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THE NEW HISTORY 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK . BOSTON • CHICAGO 
DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO.. Limited 

LONDON . BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE NEW HISTORY 

ESSAYS ILLUSTRATING THE 

MODERN HISTORICAL OUTLOOK 



BY 



JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON 

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1912 

All rights reserved 



.R<bS8 



Copyright, 1912, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 19 12. 



Norfajootr 33res8 

J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



% 



V 



PREFACE 

All of the essays in this volume, with the exception 
of the fourth, have been printed before, as addresses 
or contributions to periodicals. They have, however, 
not only been carefully revised, but have been ad- 
justed so as to give as much coherence as possible 
to the collection. They all illustrate, each in its 
particular way, the conception of ''the new history" 
developed in the first essay. 

In No. I, I borrow portions from an article on 
^'Popular Histories and their Defects" which ap- 
peared in the now defunct International Monthly, 
July, 1900, but have made a new use of them. 
The second paper was originally prepared as one 
in a series of non-technical lectures delivered at 
Columbia University in 1908 and published by the 
Columbia University Press. With it has been com- 
bined portions from a paper on ''The New History" 
read before the Philosophical Society in Phila- 
delphia, April 22, 1911. No. in was read before 
the American Historical Association, December, 1910, 
and printed in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, 
and Scientific Method, March 16, 191 1, where No. 
VIII also appeared on May n of the same year. 



VI PREFACE 

No. V was read, under the caption "The Significance 
of History in Industrial Education/' before the super- 
intendents of the larger cities at the meeting of the 
National Educational Association at IndianapoHs, 
March 2, 1910, and was printed in The Educational Bi 
Monthly, June, 1910. No.VI was read before the Ne 
England Teachers Association at Hartford, April 2^ 
1906. No. VH is a combination of two articles: 
''The Tennis Court Oath," prepared for the meeting 
of the American Historical Association in 1894 and 
published in their proceedings and in the Political 
Science Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 3, and "The French 
Declaration of the Rights of Man," which was printed 
in the latter journal, Vol. XIV, No. 4; together with 
borrowings from an article in the American Historical 
Review, April, 1906, on "Some Recent Tendencies 
in the Study of the French Revolution." 

J. H. R. 

Columbia University, New York, 

November, 1911. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 
CHAPTER J 

■' I. The New History 

26 

II. The History of History 

^ III. The New Allies of History ...-70 

IV. Some Reflections on Intellectual History ioi 

V. History for the Common Man . • .132 

^ VI. "The Fall of Rome" I54 v/ 

Vll. "The Principles of 1789" • • * • ^95 

sVIII. The Conservative Spirit in the Light of 

History 



236 



THE NEW HISTORY 

In its amplest meaning History includes every trace 
W vestige of everything that man has done or thought 
See first he appeared on the earth It may asprre 
to follow the fate of nations or it may depict the habits 
and emotions of the most obscure mdividual. It 
Sources of information extend from the rude fiin 
hatchets of Chelles to this morning's newspaper. It 
?s the vigue and comprehensive science of past human 
aff ai s We are within its bounds whether we decipher 
a mo tgage on an Assyrian tile, estimate the value o 
JhrDiamond Necklace, or describe the over-.hort 
pastry to which Charles V was addicted to his undoing^ 
The tragic reflections of Eli's daughter-in^aw when 
le learned of the discomfiture of her_ People at Eb- 
ezer are history; so are the provisions of Magna 
Charta the origin of the doctrine of transubstantia- 
Sn L fall S Santiago, the difference between a 
black friar and a white friar, and the certified circu- 
Stt of the N^ York WorU ^PO"^ ^e^bruary 
of the current year. Each fact has its interest 
and importance ; all have been carefully record d^ 

Now when a writer opens and begins to peruse the 
thiS closely written volume of human experience, 



THE NEW HISTORY 



With a View of making an abstract of it for those who 
have no time to study the original work, he is imme- 
diately forced to ask himself what he shall select 
to present to his readers' attention. He finds that 
the great book from which he gains his information is 
grotesquely out of perspective, for it was compiled 
by many different hands, and by those widely sepa- 
rated m time and in sentiment — by Herodotus, 
Machiavelli, Eusebius, St. Simon, Otto of Freising, 
Pepys, St. Luke, the Duchess of Abrantes, Sallust' 
Cotton Mather. The portentously serious alternates 
with the lightest gossip. A dissipated courtier may 
be allotted a chapter and the destruction of a race 
be left unrecorded. It is clear that in treating history 
for the general reader the question of selection and 
proportion is momentous. Yet when we turn to our 
more popular treatises on the subject, the obvious 
and pressing need of picking and choosing, of selecting 
reselecting, and selecting again, would seem to have 
escaped most writers. They appear to be the victims 
of tradition in dealing with the past. They exhibit 
but little appreciation of the vast resources upon 
which they might draw, and unconsciously follow for 
the most part, an established routine in their selection 
of facts. When we considerdiev^trange of human 
interests, our histories furnish us with a sadly inade- 
quate and misleading review of the past, and it 
might almost seem as if historians had joined in a 
conspiracy to foster a narrow and relatively unedi- 



THE NEW HISTORY 3 

fying conception of the true scope and intent of his- 
torical study. This is apparent if we examine any of 
the older standard outhnes or handbooks from which 
a great part of the public has derived its notions of 
the past, either in school or later in hfe. 

The following is an extract from a compendium 
much used until recently in schools and colleges: 
"Robert the Wise (of Anjou) (1309-1343), the suc- 
cessor of Charles II of Naples, and the champion of 
the Guelphs, could not extend his power over Sicily 
where Frederick II (i 296-1337), the son of Peter of 
Aragon, reigned. Robert's granddaughter, Joan 1, 
after a career of crime and misfortune, was strangled 
in prison by Charles Durazzo, the last male descendant 
of the house of Anjou in Lower Italy (1382), who 
seized on the government. Joan II, the last heir o 
Durazzo (1414-143S), first adopted Alfonso V of 
Aragon, and then Louis III, of Anjou, and his brother, 
Rene Alfonso, who inherited the crown- of Sicily, 
united both kingdoms (i43S), after a war with Rene 
and the Visconti of Milan." 

This is not, as we might be tempted to suspect, a 
mere collection of data for contingent reference no 
more intended to be read than a table of logarithms 
It is a characteristic passage from the six pages which 
a distinguished scholar devotes to the Italy of Dante, 
Petrarch, and Lorenzo the Magnificent. In pre- 
paring a guide for more advanced pupils and the 
general reader, the author's purpose was, he tells us, 



4 THE NEW HISTORY 

'' that it should present the essential facts of his- 
tory in due order, . . . that it should point out clearly 
the connection of events and of successive eras with one 
another; that through the interest awakened by the 
natural, unforced view gained of this unity of history 
and by such illustrative incidents as the brevity of the 
narrative would allow to be wrought into it, the dry- 
ness of a mere summary should be so far as possible 
relieved." Now, in treating the Italian Renais- 
sance, this writer has chosen barely to mention the 
name of Francesco Petrarca, but devotes a twelfth \ 
of the available space to the interminable dynastic 
squabbles of southern Italy. We may assume that 
this illustrates his conception of ^Hhe essential facts 
of history presented in due order," for the extracts 
quoted above can hardly be an example of ^'illustra- 
tive incidents" wrought in to reheve the dryness of a 
mere summary. 

I open a more recent volume which treats of the 
whole of Europe in the eighteenth century, as it 
approached the momentous crisis of the French Revo- 
lution. Its author could hardly fail to realize the 
necessity of sifting his material most critically in 
order to make clear the regenerative workings of the 
new spirit of enlightenment amid conditions essentially 
difficult for us to understand. He does not hesitate, 
however, to insert such statements as these: "Zin- 
zendorf died in 1742, Stahremberg in 1745, Kinsky in 
1748. While Uhlfeld became on Zinzendorf's death 



THE NEW HISTORY 5 

nominally chancellor, Bartenstein remained from 
1740 to 1753 Minister of Foreign Affairs, and had the 
greatest influence in the secret conference of Min- 
isters." Very true; but were there not, perhaps, 
other things better worth telling about an ill-under- 
stood century than the dates of the deaths of the 
members of an Austrian cabinet ? 

An able historian of the French Revolution, who 
finds no time to tell us how it all came about, cheer- 
fully devotes many paragraphs to matters like the 
following : ''The bailHage of Aunis claimed to be inde- 
pendent of Saintonge, the royal bailliage of Nivernais 
asserted that it included the ducal bailHage, and the 
old quarrel between Upper and Lower Auvergne again 
broke out. Similar rivalry appeared between the 
cities of Riom and Clermont-Ferrand, each claiming 
to be the capital of the bailliage of Lower Auvergne, 
and between the towns of Clermont-en-Argonne and 
Varennes; Chateauneuf-en-Thimerais asserted that 
it was a royal bailliage, and not dependent on 

Chartres." 

The tendency to catalogue mere names of persons 
and places which have not the least importance for 
the reader, or which for want of space must be left 
as undetermined as x, y, and z in an unsolved equation, 
is too common to require further illustration. The 
question forces itself upon us, why do writers include 
such seemingly irrelevant and unedifying details? 
Sometimes, doubtless, from mere thoughtlessness; 



6 THE NEW HISTORY 

the names mean something to the writer, who mis- 
takenly infers that they are eloquent in themselves. 
Or he may suppose that they give greater vivacity 
to his tale, or will form the nucleus about which future 
knowledge may crystallize. Names but once men- 
tioned, however, rarely add vividness to a story, 
but rather obscure it ; and it is safe to say that the 
mention of Durazzo, Clermont-Ferrand, Kinsky, and 
Rene are little likely to stimulate farther historical 
research, but rather to promote general obfuscation. 

It is, however, often urged that even the hastiest 
and driest chronicle of the "chief events " in the world's 
history is a good thing, — that we get at least a chron- 
ological outline which we carry about with us as a 
guide, which enables us to put our future knowledge 
in its proper relations. We learn important dates 
so as to read intelligently later of events of which in 
school we learn only the names. We prepare our- 
selves to place our contingent knowledge of literature, 
philosophy, institutions, and art in what is called an 
"historic setting." Aiany of us have, however, come 
to suspect that such an outline amounts to very little. 
It recommends itself, it is true, as the easiest kind of 
history to teach, since it requires no thought, — only 
memory. I once had occasion to ask a college pro- 
fessor of great erudition and culture, who had resided 
several years in the Orient, the date of the Hegira, 
which, with that of Marathon, and the battle of Crecy' 
is generally regarded as part of the equipment of every 



THE NEW HISTORY 7 

educated gentleman. He did not know the date, 
however, any better than I did, so we looked it up 
in a dictionary. We might, indeed, have saved a 
minute or two if we had had the information at our 
tongue's end, but we had never missed it before. 

A sensible carpenter or plumber does not constantly 
carry a saw in his hip pocket, or a coil of lead pipe 
over his shoulder, in order to be ready for a distant 
emergency. He very properly goes to his shop and 
his tool chest for his tools and materials. No more, 
in these days of cheap and convenient books of ref- 
erence, need the student of history go heavy-armed 
for intellectual encounters. Of course all knowledge, 
even that which is well forgotten, may beget a certain 
habit of accuracy and sense of proportion, but for- 
mulas should follow knowledge, as they do in our best 
mathematical textbooks ; in historical instruction we 
have ordinarily given our formulas first. 

The really fundamental reason for hastening to 
introduce the reader as early as possible to the son of 
Peter of Aragon, to Zinzendorf, and that historic 
spot, Chateauneuf-en-Thimerais, has doubtless been 
the venerable predilection for merely political events 
and persons which has until recently dominated our 
writers of popular history. Carlyle's warning has 
passed unheeded, that far away from senate houses, 
battle fields, and king's antechambers, ^'the mighty 
tide of thought and action was still rolling on its 
wondrous course." Elaborate attempts have indeed 



8 THE NEW HISTORY 

been made to justify this seemingly disproportionate 
fondness for political and military affairs. We are 
bluntly told by Mr. Freeman that ''History is past 
poKtics.'^ To Ranke the purpose of history was to 
clarify our notions of the origin and nature of the 
State, which forms the basis of the continuity that 
we beHeve we observe in human development. An- 
other German scholar claims that for thousands of 
years the State, the political organism, has been the 
chief and predominating theme of historical research 
and that it should remain so.^ 

It is impossible to discuss here the intricate ques- 
tion of the role of the State in the past; nor is it neces- 
sary to do so, for no one denies its great importance or 
would advocate its neglect in our historical manuals. 
The real question is, has not our bias for political 
history led us to include a great many trifling details 
of dynasties and military history which merely con- 
found the reader and take up precious space that 
should be devoted to certain great issues hitherto 
neglected? The winning or losing of a bit of terri- 
tory by a Louis or a Frederick, the laborious piecing 
together of a puny duchy destined to speedy disinte- 

* A bitter war was waged for some years among German scholars 
over the question of the proper scope of history, whether the Stat 
or general culture is its proper theme. Professor SchmoUer denounce 
the effort to assert the exclusive claims of political history as "jen 
Neigung enger bornierter Geister, die ihre Blossen mit Scheuklappe 
zudecken um einen Rechstitel fur ihre Unwissenheit auf den Nacb 
bargebieten zu haben." Jahrh. f. Gesetzgehung, etc., Vol. XIII, p. 148. 



THE NEW HISTORY 



gration upon the downfall of a Caesar Borgia, struggles 
between rival dynasties, the ambitions of young kings' 
uncles, tae turning of an enemy's flank a thousand 
years ago, — have not such things been given an un- 
meritecl prominence? Man is more than a warrior, 
a subj ect, or a princely ruler ; the State is by no means 
his S(3le interest. In the Middle Ages he organized 
a church more permanent, more penetratingly power- 
ful, by all accounts, than any civil government ever 
seer^^ even that of Rome itself. He has, through the 
a.^es, made voyages, extended commerce, founded 
cities, estabHshed great universities, written books, 
built glorious cathedrals, painted pictures, and sought 
out many inventions. The propriety of including 
these human interests in our historical manuals is 
being more and more widely recognized, but political 
history still retains its supreme position, and past po- 
litical events are still looked upon by the public as 
history par excellence. 

In contrast, and even in seeming contradiction, to 

the tradition which gives prominence to pohtical 

events and personages, there is a curious element 

of the sensational in our popular histories. There 

is a kind of history which does not concern itself with 

the normal conduct and serious achievements of 

\nkind in the past, but, like melodrama, purposely 

Jects the picturesque and lurid as its theme. 

ii«- annals of Fiance, a modern writer assures us, will 

\y^ command special attention, for ''No other 



lO THE NEW HISTORY 

modern nation has undergone changes more frequent, 
more radical, more sudden, bloody, and \dramatic." 
Then, too: "No land has given .birth to ipien morej 
great, more good, more brave ; none has been cursed^ 
with men more vile. No people have climbed higher 
in the arduous pathway of Xdctory ; none hav e been 
so pitilessly stricken down in defeat." In short, 
''France has furnished the epic poem of rp odern 
history." The writer would therefore convint-^e us 
that the more prodigious the occurrences narra. ted, 
the better the history. A distinguished chemist on^-^e^ 
considerately told me that it seemed to him that the"*'] 
certitude of history varied in inverse ratio to what 
we know about it. He might have added that some- 
times, in common with the Police Gazette, its intrin- 
sic interest appears to vary in direct ratio to its grue- 
someness. 

There would be less objection to perpetuating the 
conception of history as a chronicle of heroic persons 
and romantic occurrences, were it not that the craving 
for the dramatic can be better met by confessed fiction, 
and that those who see in history an epic poem give 
us very imperfect and erroneous notions of the past. 
In no other subject of study except history, is fortui- 
tous prominence accepted as a measure of importance. 
The teacher of chemistry does not confine himself 
to pretty experiments, but conscientiously chooses 
those that are most typical and instructive. Met- 
potassium and hquefied air are less common ii 



I 



THE NEW HISTORY II 

laboratory than water, lime, and sulphuric acid. What 
would be the opinion in regard to a clinical lecturer 
who dwelt upon leprosy and the bubonic plague for 
fear his students might be bored by a description of 
the symptoms of measles and typhoid? In every 
study except history the teacher seeks to make the 
important and normal clear at any cost. All his 
expedients are directed to that one end. The rule, 
not the exception, is his object. 

It is noteworthy, too, that we generally recognize 
the misleading character of descriptions of contem- 
poraneous conditions in which only the sensational 
events are narrated. Romantic marriages and tragic 
deaths; the doings of poisoners, adulterers, and 
lunatics; the cases of those who have swallowed 
needles to find them coming out at unexpected places 
years after; who have taken laudanum for pare- 
goric, or been run over by beer wagons; even the 
fullest account of such matters furnishes, after all, but 
a partial picture of the Hfe of a great city to-day. Yet 
in the history of France alluded to above, the descrip- 
tion of the feudal system scarcely extends beyond dun- 
geons,— *' Oh how damp, dark, and cold ! "— knee clamps 
and thumbscrews. The medieval church was, we might 
infer, Httle more than the clever device of evil men 
' to gratify greed and lasciviousness, and abounded in 
1 ''humbugs, frauds, and bogus miracles." To make 
'*^true statements is not necessarily to tell the truth. 
*^^We may, like the ''yellow" journaHst, narrate facts, 



12 THE NEW HISTORY 

but with such reckless disregard of perspective, and 
with such a consistent anxiety to startle the reader, 
that unvarnished fiction would be preferable. A 
writer who, instead of endeavoring to make plain the 
true greatness of the church, says, *' Miraculous oil 
was common, portions of the true cross plentiful, 
and such objects as St. Anne's comb and the Virgin 
Mary's petticoat were accessible to the devout," 
is guilty of gross misrepresentation within the bounds 
of formal accuracy. 

The partiality exhibited by our popular writers for 
certain classes of historical facts is obviously no proof 
that other and more pertinent facts should not be 
brought to the reader's attention. For it may be, as 
we have seen, either that events are narrated simply 
because they are pleasing, or dramatic, or highly excep- 
tional; or that they are mentioned because it is 
deemed proper that an educated man should know that 
Philip Augustus became king in 1180, and that the 
Battle of the Boyne was fought in 1690. But a 
writer who is governed by these motives in his selec- 
tion of material will naturally produce a book in which 
famous episodes and mildly diverting anecdotes are 
given a didactic seriousness by a proper admixture of 
dry, traditional information. 

We are, further, ordinarily taught to view mankind 
as in a periodic state of turmoil. Historical writers 
do all they can, by studied neglect, to disguise the im- 
portance of the lucid intervals during which the 



I 



THE NEW HISTORY 13 

greater part of human progress has taken place. 
They skip lightly from one commotion to another. 
They have not time to explain what the French Revo- 
lution was by rationally describing the Ancien regime, 
which can alone give it any meaning, but after the 
quotation from La Bruyere, regarding certain fierce 
animals, ''black, livid, and burnt by the sun," and a 
repetition of that careless phrase, "After us, the del- 
uge," they hasten on to the Reign of Terror as the be- 
all and end-all of the bloody affair. And in this way 
they make a second St. Bartholomew's of one of the 
grandest and, in its essential reforms, most peaceful of 
changes which ever overtook France or Europe. Ob- 
viously the real significance of a revolution is to be 
measured by the extent to which general conditions 
were changed and new things substituted for the old. 
The old must, therefore, be studied quite as carefully 
as the new — more carefully, indeed, since our sym- 
pathies are usually with the new, and our knowledge of 
the more recent is fuller than that of the more remote. 
Hence, we might far better busy ourselves with the 
reasons why arbitrary imprisonments, the guilds, the 
sale of offices, and so forth, were defended by many 
thoughtful, well-intentioned citizens than waste time 
in a gratuitous denunciation of them. 

I know that at this point the perfectly natural ob- 
jection may be raised, that while institutions and grad- 
ual developments may be very legitimate objects of 
study for those already trained in historical work, 



14 THE NEW HISTORY 

they are not proper subjects for any one except a 
university student or an occasional serious-minded 
and long-suffering general reader. Only conspicuous 
events and striking crises are, it is ordinarily assumed, 
within the scope of natural human interest, and the 
influence of the personal element must, it is urged, 
be exaggerated, simply because the general trend of 
development and progress offers nothing which the 
mind can easily grasp. We therefore substitute for 
the real historical continuity a factitious continuity 
and string our narrative upon a line of kings — Magnus 
VI (1263-1281), followed by Erick II (1281-1299), 
followed by Hakon V (1299-13 20), followed by Mag- 
nus VII (13 20-1365). No one will deny, however, 
that most of the names in even the best-known dynas- 
ties remain mere names; and even if we learn that 
Emperor Rudolph II was a learned man and an 
astrologer, and his contemporary, Henry III of 
France, '^a debauched weakling," this knowledge in no 
way aids us in grasping the most fundamental and 
valuable truth which the past has to teach us, that of 
historical continuity. 

Those therefore who would view with distrust any 
attempt radically to alter our current methods of 
presenting general history, would probably withdraw 
their opposition to a change, if some scheme could be 
devised by which conditions and institutions could be 
made interesting and comprehensible, and a real con- 
tinuity be substituted for the kingly nexus with which 



THE NEW HISTORY IS 

We now bind the past together. Now I firmly believe 
that "institutions" (which are after all only national 
habits) can be made interesting. I use the word "m- ^ 
stitutions" in a very broad sense to include the ways 
in which people have thought and acted m the past, 
their tastes and their achievements in many fields 
besides the political. Events are the more or less 
clear expression of "institutions" in this sense, and the 
events properly selected will serve to make the "m- 
stitutions" clear. 

Hitherto writers have been prone to deal with events 
for their own sake ; a deeper insight will surely lead us, 
as time goes on, to reject the anomalous and seemingly 
accidental occurrences and dwell rather upon those 
which illustrate some profound historical truth.' And 
there is a very simple principle by which the relevant 
and useful may be determined and the irrelevant re- 
jected Is the fact or occurrence one which will aid 
the reader to grasp the meaning of any great period of 
human development or the true nature of any momen- 
tous institution? It should then be cherished as a 
precious means to an end, and the more engaging it is, 
the better; its inherent interest will only facihtate 
our work, not embarrass it. On the other hand, is 
an event seemingly fortuitous, isolated, and anoma- 
lous, -like the story of Rienzi, the September mas- 
sacres, or the murder of Marat ? We should then hesi- 
tate to include it on its own merits, — at least in a 
brief historical manual - for, interesting as it may be 



l6 THE NEW HISTORY 

as an heroic or terrible incident, it may mislead the 
reader and divert his attention from the prevailing 
interests, preoccupations and permanent achievements 
of the past. 

If we have not been unfair in our review of the more 
striking pecuHarities of popular historiography, we 
find them to be as follows : — 

(i) A careless inclusion of mere names, which can 
scarcely have any meaning for the reader and which, 
instead of stimulating thought and interest, merely 
weigh down his spirit. 

(2) A penchant more or less irresistible to recite 
political events to the exclusion of other matters 
often of far greater moment. 

(3) The old habit of narrating extraordinary epi- 
sodes, not because they illustrate the general trend of 
affairs or the prevaiHng conditions of a particular time, 
but simply because they are conspicuous in the annals 
of the past. This results in a ludicrous disregard of 
perspective which assigns more importance to a de- 
mented journalist like Marat than to so influential a 
writer as Erasmus. 



II 

The essay which immediately follows this will be 
devoted to a sketch of the history of history, and will |j 
explain more fully the development of the older id(als j| 
of historical composition. It will make clear that thbse 



THE NEW HISTORY 1 7 

ideals have changed so much from time to time that it 
is quite possible that an essentially new one may in 
time prevail. History is doubtless 

An orchard bearing several trees 
And fruits of different tastes. 

It may please our fancy, gratify our serious or idle 
curiosity, test our memories, and, as Bolingbroke says, 
contribute to '' a creditable kind of ignorance." But 
the one thing that it ought to do, and has not yet effec- 
tively done, is to help us to understand ourselves and 
our fellows and the problems and prospects of man- 
kind. It is this most significant form of history's 
usefulness that has been most commonly neglected. 

It is true that it has long been held that certain 
lessons could be derived from the past, — precedents 
for the statesman and the warrior, moral guidance and 
consoHng instances of providential interference for 
the commonalty. But there is a growing suspicion, 
which has reached conviction in the minds of most 
modern historians, that this type of usefulness is purely 
illusory. The present writer is anxious to avoid any 
risk of being regarded as an advocate of these sup- 
posed advantages of historical study. Their value 
rests on the assumption that conditions remain suffi- 
ciently uniform to give precedents a perpetual value, 
while, as a matter of fact, conditions, at least in our 
own time, are so rapidly altering that for the most part 
it would be dangerous indeed to attempt to apply 



^8 THE NEW HISTORY 

past experience to the solution of current problems 
Moreover, we rarely have sufficient reliable informa- 
tion m regard to the supposed analogous situation in 
the past to enable us to apply it to present needs. 

Mostoftheappealsofinexpensiveoratoryto"whathis 
tory teaches" belong to this class of assumed analogies 
which will not bear close scrutiny. When I speak of 
history enabling us to understand ourselves and the 
problems and prospects of mankind, I have something 
quite different in mind, which I will try to make plain 
by calhng the reader's attention to the use that he 
makes of his own personal history. 

We are almost entirely dependent upon our mem- 
ory of our past thoughts and experiences for an under- 
standing of the situation in which we find ourselves at 
any given moment. To take the nearest example the 
reader will have to consult his own history to under- 
stand why his eyes are fixed upon this particular page 
If he should fall into a sound sleep and be suddenly 
awakened, his memory might for the moment be 
paralyzed, and he would gaze in astonishment about 
the room, with no realization of his whereabouts. 
The fact that all the familiar objects about him pre- 
sented themselves plainly to his view would not be 
sufficient to make him feel at home until his memory 
had come to his aid and enabled him to recall a cer- 
tam portion of the past. The momentary suspension 
of memory's functions as one recovers from a faint- 
ing fit or emerges from the effects of an an<estheric 



THE NEW HISTORY 19 

is sometimes so distressing as to amount to a 
sort of intellectual agony. In its normal state the 
mind selects automatically, from the almost infimte 
mass of memories, just those things in our past 
which make us feel at home in the present. It 
works so easily and efficiently that we are unconscious 
of what it is doing for us and of how dependent we 
are upon it. It supplies so promptly and so precisely 
what we need from the past in order to make the 
present intelligible that we are beguiled into the mis- 
taken notion that the present is self-explanatory and 
quite able to take care of itself, and that the past is 
largely dead and irrelevant, except when we have to .^ 
make a conscious effort to recall some elusive fact. ." 

What we call history is not so different from our 
more intimate personal memories as at first sight it 
seems to be ; for very many of the useful and essential 
elements in our recollections are not personal experi- 
ences at all, but include a multitude of things which we 
have been told or have read; and these play a very 
important part in our life: \ Should the reader of this 
page stop to reflect, he would perceive a long succession 
of historical antecedents leading up to his presence m a 
particular room, his ability to read the English lan- 
guage, his momentary freedom from pressing cares, and 
his inclination to center his attention upon a discus- 
sion of the nature and value of historical study. Were 
he not vaguely conscious of these historical antece- 
dents, he would be in the bewildered condition spoken 



^° THE NEW HISTORY 

hL'^°"- JT °^ '''' "^^"^°"^^ "^-^^ary to save 
him from his bewilderment are parts of his own past 
experience, but many of them belong to the ririmi 

were he confined either to the immediatrimpresrns of 
the momen , or to his personal experiences. ItXs 
one something of a shock, indeed, to consider whTa 
very small part of our guiding convictions are in anv 
way connected with our personal experience S 

act as that of Artaphemes or of Innocent III • we are 
forced to a helpless reliance upon the evMe^ce of 
others for both events. cviuence ot 

_ So it comes about that our personal recollections 

he word. History, from this point of view, may be 
regarded as an artificial extension and broadening o 
our memories and may be used to overcome the na'ura 
bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations. Could we 
suddenly be endowed with a Godlike and exhaustive 
know edge of the whole history of mankind, far ml 
omplete than the combined knowledge of a 1 the hi 
tones ever written, we should gain forthwith a God- 
l.ke appreciation of the world in which we live, and a 
Godlike insight into the evils which mankind now suf! 
f ers, as well as into the most promising methods for alle- 



THE NEW HISTORY 21 

viating them, not because the past would furnish prece- 
dents of conduct, hut because our conduct would be based 
upon a perfect comprehension of existing conditions 
founded upon a perfect knowledge of the past. As yet we 
are not in a position to interrogate the past with a view 
to gaining light on great social, poHtical, economic, 
rehgious, and educational questions in the manner in 
which we settle the personal problems which face us — 
for example, whether we should make such and such a 
visit or investment, or read such and such a book, — by 
unconsciously judging the situation in the Kght of our 
recollections. Historians have not as yet set them- 
selves to furnish us with what lies behind our great 
contemporaneous task of human betterment. They 
have hitherto had other notions of their functions, and 
were they asked to furnish answers to the questions that 
a person au courant with the problems of the day would 
most naturally put to them, they would with one ac- 
cord begin to make excuses. One would say that it 
had long been recognized that it was the historian's 
business to deal with kings, parliaments, constitutions, 
wars, treaties, and territorial changes ; another would 
declare that recent history cannot be adequately 
written and that, therefore, we can never hope to 
bring the past into relation with the present, but must 
always leave a fitting interval between ourselves and 
the nearest point to which the historian should venture 
to extend his researches ; a third will urge that to have 
a purpose in historical study is to endanger those prin- 



22 THE NEW HISTORY 

ciples of objectivity upon which all sound and scien- 
tific research must be based. So it comes about that 
our books are like very bad memories which insist 
upon recaUing facts that have no assignable relation 
to our needs, and this is the reason why the practical 
value of history has so long been obscured. 

In order to make still clearer our dependence upon 
history in dealing with the present, let the reader 
remember that we owe most of our institutions to 
a rather remote past, which alone can explain their 
origin. The conditions which produced the Holy 
Roman Apostolic Church, trial by jury, the Privy 
Council, the degree of LL.D., the Book of Common 
Prayer, ''the liberal arts," were very different from 
those that exist to-day. Contemporaneous religious, 
educational, and legal ideals are not the immediate 
product of existing circumstances, but were developed 
in great part during periods when man knew far less 
than he now does. Curiously enough our habits of 
thought change much more slowly than our environ- 
ment and are usually far in arrears. Our respect for 
a given institution or social convention may be purely 
traditional and have little relation to its value, as 
judged by existing conditions. We are, therefore, in 
constant danger of viewing present problems with ob- 
solete emotions and of attempting to settle them by 
obsolete reasoning. This is one of the chief reasons 
why we are never by any means perfectly adjusted to 
our environment. 



THE NEW HISTORY 



23 



\ 



Our notions of a church and its proper function in 
society, of a capitalist, of a liberal education, of paying 
taxes, of Sunday observance, of poverty, of war, are de- 
termined only to a slight extent by what is happening 
to-day. The belief on which I was reared, that God 
ordained the observance of Sunday from the clouds of 
Sinai, is an anachronism which could not spontane- 
ously have developed in the United States in the 
nineteenth century ; nevertheless, it still continues to 
influence the conduct of many persons. We pay our 
taxes as grudgingly as if they were still the extortions 
of feudal barons or absolute monarchs for their per- 
sonal gratification, although they are now a contribu- 
tion to our common expenses fixed by our own rep- 
resentatives. Few have outgrown the emotions con- 
nected with war at a time when personal prowess played 
a much greater part than the Steel Trust. Conserva- 
tive college presidents still feel obliged to defend the 
"liberal arts" and the ''humanities" without any 
very clear understanding of how the task came to be 
imposed upon them. To do justice to the anachro- 
nisms in conservative economic and legal reasoning 
would require a whole volume. 

Society is to-day engaged in a tremendous and un- 
precedented effort to better itself in manifold ways. 
Never has our knowledge of the world and of man been 
so great as it now is ; never before has there been so 
much general good will and so much intelligent social 
activity as now prevails. The part that each of us 



24 THE NEW HISTORY 

can play in forwarding some phase of this reform will 
depend upon our understanding of existing conditions 
and opinion, and these can only be explained, as has 
been shown, by following more or less carefully the 
processes that produced them. We must develop his- 
torical-mindedness upon a far more generous scale 
than hitherto, for this will add a still deficient element 
in our intellectual equipment and will promote ra- 
tional progress as nothing else can do. The present 
has hitherto been the willing victim of the past; 
the time has now come when it should turn on the 
past and exploit it in the interests of advance. 

The ''New History" is escaping from the limitations 
formerly imposed upon the study of the past. It will 
come in time consciously to meet our daily needs ; it 
will avail itself of all those discoveries that are being 
made about mankind by anthropologists, economists, 
psychologists, and sociologists — discoveries which 
during the past fifty years have served to revolution- 
ize our ideas of the origin, progress, and prospects of 
our race. There is no branch of organic or inorganic 
science which has not undergone the most remarkable 
changes during the last half century, and many new 
branches of social science, even the names of which 
would have been unknown to historians in the 
middle of the nineteenth century, have been added to 
the long Hst. It is inevitable that history should be 
involved in this revolutionary process, but since it 
must be confessed that this necessity has escaped many 



THE NEW HISTORY 



25 



contemporaneous writers, it is no wonder that the in- 
teUigent public continues to accept somewhat archaic 
ideas of the scope and character of history. 

The title of this little volume has been chosen with 
the view of emphasizing the fact that history should 
not be regarded as a stationary subject which can only 
progress by refining its methods and accumulating, 
criticizing, and assimilating new material, but that it is 
bound to alter its ideals and aims with the general 
progress of society and of the social sciences, and that 
it should ultimately play an infinitely more important 
role in our intellectual life than it has hitherto done. 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 

"History" is so vague a term at best, and has dur- 
ing the past twenty-five hundred years undergone such 
considerable changes in character and purpose, that 
it is well for one to review its somewhat startling 
vicissitudes if he desires to understand the conflicting 
notions which prevail to-day in regard to the signifi- 
cance of the past and the proper way of dealing with 
it. When we look back over the history of history, 
from Hecataeus of Miletus and Herodotus to the 
freshest doctor's dissertation, we perceive that its 
point of view has never been a settled one; that it 
has been the victim at once of routine and of tran- 
sient circumstances. Some of its former ambitions 
it has now been forced to surrender; it has been 
chastened by a growing consciousness of ignorance; 
but these humiliations have been far more than offset 
by the extraordinary extension of its domain, which 
has taken place very recently and almost insensibly. 
Half a century ago, man's past was supposed to in- 
clude less than six thousand years ; now the story is 
seen to stretch back hundreds of thousands of years. 
But it is not man alone that has a history, — animals, 
plants, rocks, stars, even atoms, have theirs as well. 
So the zoologist, the botanist, the geologist, the as 

26 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 27 

tronomer, even the chemist have come to worship at 
History's shrine. / 

The growth of historical-mindedness is thus perhaps 
the chief intellectual trait of our age. It is deeply 
affecting not only the social sciences but our general 
conceptions of the whole organic and inorganic world. 

I Yet in its beginnings history had no very serious aims. 

*4t was doubtless discovered, in the first instance, by 
the story-teller, and its purpose has usually been to 
tell a tale rather than to contribute to a well-con- 
sidered body of scientific knowledge. Indeed we 
shall not be far astray, if we view history, as it 
has existed through the ages, and even down to 
our own day, as a branch of general literature, the 
object of which has been to present past events in an 
artistic manner, in order to gratify a natural curiosity 
in regard to the achievements and fate of conspicuous 
persons, the rise and decay of monarchies, and the 
signal commotions and disasters which have repeat- 
edly afflicted humanity. 

Although the persistence of this primitive notion of 
history is so obvious as scarcely to demand illustration, 
it is interesting to note that as late as 1820, Daunou, a 
reputable French historian of his time, in a course of 
lectures upon the pursuit of history delivered at the 
College de France, declares that the masterpieces of 
epic poetry should claim the first attention of the 
would-be historian, since it is the poets who have 
;reated the art of narrative. Then, from the modern 



28 THE NEW HISTORY 

novel, Daunou continues, the student may learn "the 
method of giving an artistic pose to persons and events, 
of distributing details, of skillfully carrying on the 
thread of the narrative, of interrupting it, of resuming 
it, of sustaining the attention and provoking the curios- 
ity of the reader." After the poets and novelists, the 
works of standard historians should be read with a 
view to surprising the secrets of their style — Herodo- 
tus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Plutarch ; 
C^sar, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus ; and, among the 
moderns, MacchiavelH, Guicciardini, Giannone, Hume, 
Robertson, Gibbon, and Voltaire. When the founda- 
tions of an elegant Hterary style are firmly estabhshed, 
the student may re-read the standard treatises with 
attention to the matter rather than the form; for, as 
even the judicious Daunou concedes, before writing 
history "it is evidently necessary to know it." Both 
Daunou's program and his list of names — unques- 
tionably the most distinguished among historians 
throughout the centuries — testify to the strength 
of Hterary traditions among historical writers. 

Yet a formal distinction at least has of course al- 
ways been made between history and other branches of 
Hterature. This is emphasized by Polybius, writing 
in the second century before Christ. "Surely," he 
says, "an historian's object should be not to amaze his 
readers by a series of thrilhng anecdotes, nor should he 
aim to produce speeches which might have been ^de- 
livered, nor to study dramatic propriety in detail, Hkcit 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 29 

writer of tragedy. On the contrary, his function is, 
above all, to record with fidelity what was actually 
said or done, no matter how commonplace it may be." 

These warnings of Polybius were, however, com- 
monly neglected by the ancient historian, whose ob- 
ject was to interest his readers in the great men and 
striking events of the past, or to prepare him for pub- 
he hfe by describing and analyzing the policy of former 
statesmen and* generals, or to teach him to bear with 
dignity the vicissitudes of fortune by recalling the 
calamities of others. It is clear that these ends of 
amusing, instructing, or edifying were to be attained 
mainly by literary skill rather than by painful his- 
torical research. 

To Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus, history ap- 
peared to be purely human and secular. Its signifi- 
cance was confined to this world. To them any allu- 
sion to the influence of the gods or to providence would 
have seemed quite out of place. But with the estab- 
lishment of the Christian church the past began to 
take on a religious and theological meaning. 

II 

To the early Christians Hebrew history, as narrated 
in the Old Testament, served as a very important 
substantiation and illustration of their contention 
that the Messiah had at last come. By means of 
allegorical interpretation the most casual episodes of 



30 



THE NEW HISTORY 



a remote past could be given a vivid and essential re- 
lation to the present. The Christians were perhaps the 
first to suspect a real grandeur in history, for to them 
it became a divine epic, stretching back to the creation 
of man and forward to the final separation of the good 
and evil in a last magnificent and decisive crisis. 

But this theological unity and meaning of history 
was won at the tremendous sacrifice of all secular per- 
spective and accuracy. The Amorites were invested 
with an importance denied the Carthaginians. Enoch 
and Lot loomed large in a past which scarcely knew of 
a Pericles. Allegory rendered all literary or historical 
criticism irrelevant, if not an impious questioning of 
God's own revealed truth. Then Augustine came to 
give an elaborate and plausible form to his theory of 
two cities, — a City of God which had existed from the 
first and which could be traced through the Old Testa- 
ment into the New, and a City of Satan, founded by 
the fallen angels, exemplified in King Belus and Queen 
Semiramis, and trailing its obscene existence down 
through the Roman Empire to his own day. History 
became sacred and profane. The fantastically inter- 
preted Jewish records, continued in the story of Chris- 
tian martyrs and miracles, constituted history par 
excellence. 

All the achievements of Egypt, Greece, and Rome 
tended to sink out of sight in the mind of Augus- 
tine's disciple, Orosius; only the woes of a devil- 
worshiping heathendom lingered. At Augustine's 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 31 

suggestion he prepared his Seven Books of History 
directed against the Pagans. His aim was to refute 
those heathen detractors of Christianity who main- 
tained that their age was accursed above all others, 
owing to the desertion of the ancient gods. He boldly- 
maintained that, on the contrary, a veritable carnival 
of death had preceded the appearance of Christianity. 
To prove this he brought together, as he tells us, in the 
compass of a single volume, all the examples he could 
find in the annals of the past ''of the most signal hor- 
rors of war, pestilence, and famine, of the fearful devas- 
tations of earthquakes and inundations, the destruc- 
tion wrought by fiery eruptions, by lightning and hail, 
and the awful misery due to crime." His convenient 
and edifying treatise became the standard manual of 
universal history for a thousand years to follow. It 
was agreeable reading to medieval Christians, and it 
enjoyed the sanction of the chief among the church 
fathers. History thus became for Orosius, and for 
his innumerable readers in succeeding centuries, the 
story of God's punishment of sin and of the curse which 
man's original transgression had brought upon the 
whole earth. 

But we need not expose ourselves to the hot and 
withering blasts of Orosius's rhetoric in order to 
realize the salient contrast between his conception of 
history's purpose and usefulness, and that of the clas- 
sical Greek and Roman writers. In the old days the 
danger had been that Cho would fall into the way of 



32 



THE NEW HISTORY 



aping her sisters, Poetry and the Drama, and of bor- 
rowing their finery. Now, she permitted herself to 
be led away bHndfolded by Theology, which was for 
so long to be the potent rival of literature. The Greek 
historians and the greatest of the Romans, Tacitus, 
were forgotten in the Middle Ages ; so the polemical 
pamphlet of Orosius served to distort Europe's vision 
of the past for a thousand years until Thucydides and 
Polybius came once more within its ken. 

But even the revival of classical learning by no 
means put an end to the "providential" conception of 
the past. This finds beautiful expression in Bossuet's 
Universal History. He perceives behind all the great 
events which he recalls, the secret ordering of Provi- 
dence : — 

Dieu tient du plus haut des cieux les renes de tous les 
royamnes ; il a tous les coeurs en sa main ; tantot il retient les 
passions, tantot 11 leur lache la bride, et par la il remue tout le 
genre humain. Veut-il faire des conquerants ; il fait marcher 
I'epouvante devant eux, et il inspire a eux et a leurs soldats une 
hardiesse invincible. Veut-il faire des legislateurs ; il leur en- 
voie son esprit de sagesse et de prevoyance ; il leur fait prevenir 
les maux qui menacent les etats, et poser les fondements de la 
tranquillite publique. II connoit la sagesse humaine, toujours 
courte par quelque endroit ; il I'eclaire, il etend ses vues, et puis 
Tabandonne a ses ignorances ; il I'aveugle, il la precipite, il la 
confond par elle-meme ; elle s'enveloppe, elle s'embarrasse dans 
ses propres subtilites, et ses precautions lui sont un piege. Dieu 
exerce par ce moyen ses redoutables Jugements, selon les regies de 
sa justice toujours infaillible. ^ 

1 Discours sur I'histoire universelle, concluding chapter. 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 33 

Unhappily the mysterious character of divine dis- 
pensations opened the door to conflicting views of their 
meaning. All history seemed to Bossuet to exhibit 
God's constant solicitude for the Catholic Church and 
his anger against all who swerved from the faith de- 
livered to Peter and handed down by his successors. 
Luther, on the other hand, believed that History sup- 
ported him in his attack upon what he called the ^'Teu- 
fels Nest zu Rom." And not long after his death a 
group of Protestants had compiled a vast history 
of the church — The Magdeburg Centuries, as it was 
called — in which they sought to prove the diabolical 
origin of the papacy and of the Roman Catholic 
Church. Cardinal Baronius replied in twelve foHo 
volumes, written, as he trusted, under the direct 
auspices of the Virgin Mary, in which he set forth "the 
calamities divinely sent for the punishment of those 
who have dared to oppose in their arrogance, or con- 
spire against, the true church of God." For three 
centuries each party continued to suborn history in its 
own interest, and one must still, to-day, allow for 
religious bias in important fields of historical research. 
Yet in spite of all their bitterness and bhndness, reli- 
gious controversies have stimulated much scholarly in- 
vestigation in modern times, and we should be much 
poorer if certain works of a distinctly partisan char- 
acter had never been written, — such, for example, as 
Raynaldus' continuation of Baronius and, in our own 
days, Janssen's History of the German People. 



34 THE NEW HISTORY 

To the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries and 
to Cardinal Baronius — to Protestant and Catholic 
historians alike — the great, obvious, determining 
historical forces were God and the devil. Our con- 
ception of God, as well as our ideas of history, have, 
however, been changing since the sixteenth century, 
and it is rare now to find a historian who possesses the 
old confidence in his ability to penetrate God's coun- 
sels and trace his dispensations in detail. As for the 
devil, few events can longer be ascribed to him with 
perfect assurance. 

Ill 

The reversion to the worldly standards of historical 
composition, represented by Macchiavelli and Guic- 
ciardini in the early sixteenth century, became pro- 
nounced in the eighteenth. Gibbon, Voltaire, Hume, 
Robertson, and others successfully resecularized his- 
tory and strove to give their narrative of poHtical 
events the ancient elegance of form. 

Lord Bolingbroke, in his Letters on the Study of 
History, written about 1737, says: '^An appHca- 
tion to any study that tends neither to make us better 
men and better citizens is at best but a specious and 
ingenious sort of idleness; . . . and the knowledge 
we acquire by it is a creditable kind of ignorance, noth- 
ing more. This creditable kind of ignorance is, in my 
opinion, the whole benefit which the generality of 
men, even the most learned, reap from the study of 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 35 

history : and yet the study of history seems to me of .; 
all others the most proper to train us up to private ' 
and public virtue." History, he quite properly says, 
is read by most people as a form of amusement, as 
they might play at cards. Some devote themselves 
to history in order to adorn their conversation with 
historical allusions, — and the argument is still 
current that one should know enough of the past to 
understand Hterary references to noteworthy events 
and persons. The less imaginative scholar, Boling-7 
broke complains, satisfies himself with making fair] 
copies of foul manuscripts and explaining hard words ! |\ 
for the benefit of others, or with constructing more or ! 
less fantastic chronologies based upon very insecure 
data. Over against these Bolingbroke places those 
who have perceived that history is after all only 
''philosophy teaching by example." For ''the exam- 
ples which we find in history, improved by the lively 
descriptions and the just explanations or censures of 
historians," will, he believes, have a much better and 
more permanent effect than declamation, or the "dry 
ethics of mere philosophy." Moreover, to summarize 
his argument, we can by the study of history enjoy in 
a short time a wide range of experience at the expense 
of other men and without risk to ourselves. History 
enables us "to live with the men who Hved before us, 
and we inhabit countries that we never saw. Place 
is enlarged, and time prolonged in this manner : so 
that the man who applies himself early to the study of 



36 THE NEW HISTORY 

history may acquire in a few years, and before he sets 
foot in the world, not only a more extended knowledge 
of mankind, but the experience of more centuries than 
any of the patriarchs saw.'' Our own personal expe- 
rience is doubly defective ; we are born too late to see 
the beginning, and we die too soon to see the end of 
many things. History supplies in a large measure 
these defects. 

There is, of course, little originality in Bolingbroke's 
plea for history's usefulness in making wiser and better 
men and citizens. Polybius had seen, in history a 
guide for statesmen and military commanders; and 
the hope that the striking moral victories and de- 
feats of the past would serve to arouse virtue and dis- 
courage vice has been urged by innumerable chroniclers 
as the main justification of their enterprises. To-day, 
however, one rarely finds a historical student who would 
venture to recommend statesmen, warriors, and moral- 
ists to place any confidence whatsoever in historical 
analogies and warnings, for the supposed analogies 
usually prove illusive on inspection, and the warnings, 
impertinent. Whether or no Napoleon was ever able 
to make any practical use in his own campaigns of the 
accounts he had read of those of Alexander and Caesar, 
it is quite certain that Admiral Togo would have de- 
rived no useful hints from Nelson's tactics at Alexan- 
dria or Trafalgar. Our situation is so novel that it 
would seem as if political and military precedents of 
even a century ago could have no possible value. As 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 



37 



for our present ^^ anxious morality," as Maeterlinck 
calls it, it seems equally clear that the sinful extrava- 
gances of Sardanapalus and Nero, and the conspicuous 
public virtue of Aristides and the Horatii, are alike 
impotent to promote it. 

In the eighteenth century a considerable number of 
''philosophies of history" appeared and enjoyed great 
popularity. They were the outcome of a desire to 
seize and explain the general trend of man's past. Of 
course this had been also the purpose of Augustine 
and Bossuet, but Voltaire devoted his Philosophie de 
Vhistoire (1765) mainly to discrediting religion as 
commonly accepted ; and instead of offering any par- 
ticular theory of the past he satisfied himself with pick- 
ing out what he calls "les verites utiles." He addresses 
Madame du Chatelet in the opening of his Essai sur 
les Mceurs et V esprit des nations as follows : — 

Vous ne cherchez dans cette immensite que ce qui merite 
d'etre connu de vous ; I'esprit, les mceurs, les usages des 
nations principales, appuyes des faits qu'il n'est pas permis 
d'ignorer. Le but de ce travail n'est pas de savoir en quelle 
annee un prince indigne d'etre connu succeda a un prince 
barbare chez une nation grossiere. Si Ton pouvait avoir le 
malheur de mettre dans sa tete la suite chronologique detoutes 
les dynasties, on ne saurait que des mots. Autant il faut con- 
naitre les 'grandes actions des souverains qui ont rendu leurs 
peuples meilleurs et plus heureux, autant on peut ignorer le 
vulgaire des rois, qui ne pourrait que charger la memoire. . . . 
Dans tous ces recueils immenses qu'on ne peut embrasser, il 
faut se borner et choisir. C'est un vaste magazin oil vous 
prendrez ce qui est a votre usage. 



38 THE NEW HISTORY 

Voltaire's reactions on the past were naturally just 
what might have been expected from his attitude 
toward his own times. He drew from *4e vaste mag- 
azin" those things that he needed for his great cam- 
paign, and in this he did well, however uncritical his 
criticism may seem at times to a modern historical 
student. 

Herder in his little work, Auch eine Philosophie der 
GeschicUe zur Bildung der Menschheit. Beitrag zur 
vielen Beitragen des Jahrhunderts (1774), condemns 
the general hght-heartedness and superficiaHty of 
Voltaire and other contemporary writers who were, he 
thought, vainly attempting to squeeze the story of the 
universe and man into their puny philosophic cate- 
gories. Ten years later he wrote his larger work, 
Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit, in which he strove 
to give some ideal unity and order to the vast historic 
process, beginning with a consideration of the place of 
the earth among the other heavenly bodies, and of 
man's relations to the vegetable and animal kingdoms. 
^'If," he says, "there be a god in nature, there is in 
history too ; for man is himself a part of creation, and 
in his wildest extravagances and passions must obey 
laws not less excellent and beautiful than those by 
which all the celestial bodies move. Now, as I am 
persuaded that man is capable of knowing, and des- 
tined to attain the knowledge of, everything that he 
ought to know, I step freely and confidently from the 
tumultuous scenes through which we have been wander- 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 



39 



ing, to inspect the beautiful and sublime laws of nature 
by which they have been governed.'^ Humanity is 
the end of human nature, he held, and the human race 
is destined to proceed through various degrees of civi- 
lization in various mutations ; but the permanency of 
its welfare is founded solely and essentially on reason 
and justice. It is, moreover, a natural law that "if a 
being or system of beings be forced out of the perma- 
nent position of its truth, goodness, and beauty, it 
will again approach it by its internal powers, either in 
vibrations or in an asymptote, since out of this state 
it finds no stability.'^ Herder formulates from time 
to time a considerable number of other "laws" which 
he believes emerge from the confusion of the past. 
Whatever we may think of these "laws," he con- 
stantly astonishes the modern reader not only by his 
penetrating criticism of the prevaihng philosophy of 
his time, but by flashes of deep historical insight. He 
is clearly enough the forerunner of the "Romantic" 
tendency that culminated in Hegel's celebrated Phi- 
losophy of History. 

IV 

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, new 
interests other than the more primitive literary, 
political, military, moral, and theological, have been 
developing. These have exercised a remarkable 
influence upon historical research, radically altering 



b 



40 



THE NEW HISTORY 



its spirit and aims and broadening its scope. To take 
a single example, Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws — 
first published in 1748 — reviews the past with the 
purpose of estabHshing a purely scientific proposition, 
namely, the relativity of all human institutions, social, 
political, educational, economic, legal, and mihtary. 
The discussions attending the drafting of the first 
French Constitution (1789-1791) served to provoke a 
study of constitutional history which has never since 
flagged. 

Early in the nineteenth century the cosmopolitan 
sentiments so conspicuous at the opening of the French 
Revolution began to give way to the spirit of national- 
ity which was awaking in the various European states, 
especially in Germany. This almost immediately 
showed itself in a new and highly characteristic in- 
terpretation of the philosophy of history. Although 
the writer makes no pretensions to understanding 
Hegel, it may be worth while to repeat a few things 
he said in his lectures on the philosophy of history, 
first delivered in Berhn in the winter of 1822-1823, 
for many people have thought they did understand him 
and were deeply affected by his teachings. As he 
looked back over the restless mutations of individuals 
and peoples, existing for a time and then vanishing, 
he was confident that he could trace the World-Spirit 
striving for consciousness and then for freedom, its 
essential nature. This spirit assumes successive forms 
which it successively transcends. Tj'hese forms are 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 41 

exhibited in the peculiar natural genius of historic 
peoples. The spirit of a particular people, having 
strictly defined characteristics, ^^erects itself," Hegel 
explains, ^^into an objective world that exists and 
persists in a particular form of religious worship, cus- 
toms, constitution and poHtical laws,— in short, in 
the whole complex of its institutions, and in the events 
and transactions that make up its history." The Per- 
sians, Hegel held, were the first world-historical people, 
for was it not in Persia that the World-Spirit first 
began to attain an ''unlimited immanence of subjec- 
tivity"? The Greek character was "individuality 
conditioned by beauty." ''Subjective inwardness" 
was the general principle of the Roman world. In- 
genious as this theory may be, it would hardly have 
formed the basis of a new gospel of national freedom 
and deeply affected historical interpretation, had it 
not been for Hegel's extraordinary discovery that it 
was his own dear German nation in which it had 
pleased the "Weltgeist" to assume its highest form. 
'^The German Spirit is the Spirit of the new world," 
Hegel proclaims; "its aim is the realization of abso- 
lute truth, as the unlimited self-determination of 
Freedom. ... The destiny of the German peoples 
IS to be the bearers of the Christian principle." 

The supreme role assigned by Hegel to his own 
countrymen filled them with justifiable pride. And 
was not this assumption amply borne out by the 
glories of "Deutschthum" in the Middle Ages, which 



42 THE NEW HISTORY 

the Romanticists were singing : and, much more re- 
cently, by the successful expulsion of the French 
tyrant ? That all this should combine to give a dis- 
tinct national and patriotic trend to historic research 
and writing was inevitable. The great collection of 
the sources for the German Middle Ages, — the '^Mon- 
umenta Germanic Historica " — which was to become 
a model for other nations, began to be issued in 1826, 
and for the first time the Germans became leaders in 
the historical field as in so many others. Ranke, 
Dahn, Giesebrecht, Waitz, Droysen, and dozens of 
others who began to devote themselves to German 
history, were all filled with a warm patriotism and en- 
thusiasm very different from the cosmopoKtan spirit 
of the preceding century. Throughout Europe, his- 
tory tended to become distinctly national, and an ex- 
traordinary impetus was given to the publication of 
vast collections of material. 

It was natural that this national spirit and the po- 
litical and constitutional questions of the nineteenth 
century should serve to perpetuate the older interest 
in political history. This is the most ancient, most 
obvious, and easiest kind of history, for the poKcy of 
kings, the laws they issued and the wars they fought, 
have always been the matters which were Hkeliest to 
be recorded. Then the State is the most imposing 
and important of man's social creations, and histo- 
rians have commonly felt that what was best worth 
knowing in the past could be directly or indirectly 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 43 

associated with its history. Ranke, Droysen, Mauren- 
brecher, Freeman, and many others deemed political 
history to be history in its most unmistakable form. / 



We have now reviewed the chief motives which 
appear to have influenced the greater number of his- 
torical writers from Thucydides to Macaulay and 
Ranke. They all agreed in examining more or less 
conscientiously and critically the records of past 
events and conditions with a view to amusing, edify- 
ing, or comforting the reader. But none of the main 
interests of which I have so far spoken can be regarded 
as scientific. To scan the past with the hope of dis- 
covering recipes for the making of statesmen and 
warriors, of discrediting the pagan gods, of showing 
that Catholic or Protestant is right, of exhibiting 
the stages of self-realization of the Weltgeist, or demon- 
strating that Liberty emerged from the forests of 
Germany never to return thither, — none of these 
motives are scientific, although they may go hand in 
hand with much sound scholarship. But by the 
middle of the nineteenth century the Muse of History 
— semper mutahile — began to fall under the potent 
spell of natural science. She was no longer satis- 
fied to celebrate the deeds of heroes and nations with 
the lyre and shrill flute on the breeze-swept slopes of 
Helicon; she no longer durst attempt to vindicate 



44 THE NEW HISTORY 

the ways of God to man. She came to recognize 
that she was ill-prepared for her undertakings, and 
began to spend her mornings in the library, collating 
manuscripts and making out lists of variant readings. 
She aspired to do even more, and began to talk of 
raising her chaotic mass of information to the rank 
of a science. 

The results of history's new ambition to become 
scientific are of the greatest importance. In the first 
place the sources of information in regard to the past 
began to be viewed with critical suspicion, f So long as 
historians continued to present to the reader such 
conspicuous events as they thought might enlist his 
interest, and commented on these with a view of 
fortifying his virtue or patriotism or staying his faith 
in God, it made little difference whether they took 
pains to verify the facts or not. Indeed, the exact 
truth, when we are lucky enough to get a glimpse of 
it, is rarely so picturesque or so edifying as ^'what 
might have been." But to-day a large part of the 
historian's attention is directed to the character, 
rehability, or defects of his sources. The data upon 
which history rests have been subjected to the most 
searching scrutiny. Much that was formerly relied 
upon has either been partially rejected or thrown out 
altogether ; but much has also been added by scru- 
pulous search and systematic cataloguing. 

Moreover, the historian now realizes clearly that 
all his sources of information are inferior, in their very 



I 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 45 

nature, to data available in the various fields of natural 
science. He can almost never have any direct expe- 
rience of the phenomena which he describes. He only 
knows the facts of the past by the imperfect traces 
they have left, whether in books, documents, inscrip- 
tions, or in the remains of buildings and other archae- 
ological survivals. The traces he finds in books — 
upon which he has been wont to rely chiefly — are 
usually only the reports of some one who commonly 
did not himself have any direct experience of the facts 
and who did not even take the trouble to tell us where 
he got his alleged information. This is true of almost 
all the ancient and medieval historians and annalists. 
So it comes about that ''the immense majority of the 
sources of information which furnish the historian 
with startling points for his reasoning are nothing 
else than traces of psychological operations" rather 
than direct traces of facts. As a French scholar has 
remarked, the historian is in the position of a chemist 
who should be forced to rely for his knowledge of a 
series of experiments upon what his laboratory boy 
tells him. 

To take a single example from among thousands 
which might be cited: Gibbon tells us that after the 
death of Alaric in 410 ''the ferocious character of 
the Barbarians was displayed in the funeral of the 
hero, whose valor and fortune they celebrated with 
mournful applause. By the labor of a captive multi- 
tude they forcibly diverted the course of the Busen- 



46 THE NEW HISTORY 

tinus, a small river that washes the walls of Consentia. 
The royal sepulcher, adorned with the splendid spoils 
and trophies of Rome, was constructed in the vacant 
bed; the waters were then restored to their natural 
channel, and the secret spot where the remains of 
Alaric had been deposited, was forever concealed by 
the inhuman massacre of the prisoners who had been 
employed to execute the work." The basis of this 
account is the illiterate History of the Goths written 
by an ignorant person, Jordanes, about a hundred 
and forty years after the occurrence of the supposed 
events. We know that Jordanes copied freely from 
a work of his better-instructed contemporary, Cas- 
siodorus, which has been lost. This is absolutely 
all we know about the sources of our information. 

Shall we believe this story, which has found its way 
into so many of our textbooks ? Gibbon did not 
witness the burial of Alaric, nor did Jordanes, upon 
whose tale Gibbon greatly improves, nor did Cassi- 
odorus, who was not born until some eighty years after 
the death of the Gothic king. We can control the 
*^ psychological operation" represented in Gibbon's 
text, for he says he got the tale from Jordanes, but, 
aside from our suspicion that Jordanes took the story 
from the lost book by Cassiodorus, we have no means of 
controlling the various psychological operations which 
separate the tale as we have it from the real circum- 
stances. We have other reasons than Jordanes' 
authority for supposing that Alaric is dead ; as for the 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 47 

circumstances of his burial we can only say they may 
have been as described but we have only the shghtest 
reason for supposing that they were. 

VI 

A second general result of the scientific spirit may be 
detected in Ranke's proud boast that he proposed to 
tell the truth, — wie es eigenilich gewesen. This 
modest ambition appears to have needed some apology 
in the middle of the nineteenth century. Previous 
historians, as has been explained, often had other 
dominating motives, and history was expected to 
support, or at least not run counter to, prevailing 
patriotic and religious prejudices. A conscious re- 
solve, therefore, to state the facts as he found them has 
certainly placed the historian on a far higher plane 
than he formerly occupied, and has been revolutionary 
in its effects. For example, a wide range of rehgious 
phenomena has been subjected to really scientific ex- 
amination during the past fifty years, with the most 
startling results. 

But to resolve to test one's sources carefully and 
to state only what seems to be supported by adequate 
evidence are, after all, only the bare preliminaries 
of scientific historiography. The quantity of facts 
about the past of man which are susceptible of satis- 
factory verification not only far exceeds the compass 
of any possible single presentation, but they are so 



48 THE NEW HISTORY 

heterogeneous in their character as to invite a great 
variety of interpretations. In what ways, we may 
accordingly ask next, has the potent influence of 
natural science affected historical writers in the 
choice of facts to put before the reader and in the 
explanations and interpretations which they tender 
him? 

First, what are the most striking traits of modern 
scientific method? It may be confidently replied 
that an appreciation of the overwhelming significance 
of the small, the common, and the obscure, and an un- 
hesitating rejection of all theological, supernatural, and 
anthropocentric explanations, estabhsh the brother- 
hood of all scientific workers, whatever their fields 
of research. Then there is the search for natural 
laws and their multiform applications which has 
proved fruitful beyond the wildest expectations of 
the most sanguine. Minute and patient investiga- 
tion, the discovery of natural explanations and of 
natural laws, constitute, then, the most sahent fea- 
tures of modern scientific research. 

History has so long been concealed behind a mask 
which served either to enhance the charm of her 
homely features beyond all recognition, or to render 
her famiHar and commonplace form monstrous and 
repulsive, that it is httle wonder that historians only 
slowly adjust themselves to the scientific point of 
view. The older historians had Httle inclination 
to describe familiar conditions and the common rou- 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 49 

tine of daily life. It was the startling and exceptional 
that caught their attention and which they found 
recorded in the sources on which they depended. 
They were like a geologist who should deal only with 
earthquakes and volcanoes, or, better still, a zoologist 
who should have no use for anything smaller than 
an elephant or less romantic in its habits than a 
phoenix or a basilisk. The modernizing of history has 
taken place much more slowly and much more re- 
cently than the disentangling of chemistry from 
alchemy and of astronomy from the dreams of the 
astrologer. Perhaps Buckle was right when he de- 
clared that the historians have been, on the whole, 
inferior in point of intellect to thinkers in other fields, 
but it should not be forgotten that their task is beset 
with pecuHar and well-nigh insurmountable difficulties, 
when compared with the problems of chemistry or 
geology. It is no wonder that the historian's grad- 
ual escape from ancient misapprehensions is largely 
attributable not to his own efforts, but to the general 
influence of natural science and to the specific influ- 
ence of the various social sciences which have made 
their appearance from time to time.^ 

The first social science greatly to affect the selec- 
tion of historical facts and their interpretation was, 
not unnaturally, Pohtical Economy, which developed 
during the eighteenth century. It was not a pro- 

1 The relation of history to these newer social sciences is the subject 
of the essay wliich follows this. 



50 THE NEW HISTORY 

fessional student of history, but an economist, who 
first suggested a new and wonderful series of questions 
which the historian might properly ask about the past, 
and, moreover, furnished him with a scientific explana- 
tion of many matters hitherto ill-understood. 

As early as 1845, Karl Marx denounced those who 
discover the birthplace of history in the shifting clouds 
of heaven instead of in the hard, daily work on earth. 
He maintained that the only sound and ever valid 
explanation of the past must be economic. The his- 
tory of society depends, he held, upon the methods 
by which its members produce their means of support 
and exchange the products of industry among them- 
selves. The methods of production and transporta- 
tion determine the methods of exchange, the distri- 
bution of products, the division of society into classes, 
the relations of the several classes, the existence of 
the State, the character of its laws, and all that it 
means for mankind. 

We are not concerned here with the complicated 
genesis of this idea, nor with the precise degree of 
originality to be attributed to Marx's presentation of 
it. Nor is there time to explain the manner in which 
Marx's theory was misused by himself and his fol- 
lowers. Few, if any, historians would agree that 
everything can be explained economically, as many of 
the socialists and some economists of good standing 
would have us believe. But in the sobered and 
chastened form in which most economists now accept 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 



51 



the doctrine, it serves to explain far more of the 
phenomena of the past than any other single expla- 
nation ever offered. In any case, it is the economist 
who has opened up the most fruitful new fields of 
research by emphasizing the importance of those en- 
during but often inconspicuous factors which almost 
entirely escaped historians before the middle of the 
nineteenth century. The essential interest and impor- 
tance of the normal and homely elements in human 
life have become apparent. The scientific historian 
no longer dwells by preference on the heroic, spectac- 
ular, and romantic episodes, but strives to recon- 
struct past conditions. This last point is so signifi- 
cant that we must stop over it a moment. 

History is not infrequently still defined as a record 
of past events, and the public still expect from the 
historian a story of the past. But the conscientious 
historian has come to realize that he cannot aspire 
to be a good story-teller for the simple reason that, if 
he tells no more than he has good reason for believ- 
ing to be true, his tale is usually very fragmentary 
and vague. Fiction and drama are perfectly free 
to conceive and adjust detail so as to meet the 
demands of art, but the historian should always be 
conscious of the rigid limitations placed upon him. 
If he confines himself to an honest and critical state- 
ment of a series of events as described in his sources, 
it is usually too deficient in vivid authentic detail to 
make a satisfactory story. 



52 THE NEW HISTORY 

The historian is coming to see that his task is essen- 
tially different from that of the man of letters, and 
that his place is rather among the scientists. He is 
at Kberty to use only his scientific imagmation, which 
is quite different from a literary imagination. It is 
his business to make those contributions to our general 
understanding of mankind in the past which his train- 
ing in the investigation of the records of past human 
events especially fit him to make. He esteems the 
events he finds recorded, not*for their dramatic in- 
terest, but for the light that they cast on the normal 
and generally prevalent conditions which gave rise to 
them. It makes no difference how dry a chronicle 
may be if the occurrences that it reports can be 
brought into some assignable relation with the more 
or less permanent habits and environment of a partic- 
ular people or person. If it be the chief function 
of history to show how things come about, — and 
something has already been said of this matter,^ — 
then events become for the historian, first and fore- 
most, evidence of general conditions and of changes 
affecting considerable numbers of people. In this 
respect history is only following the example set by 
the older natural sciences: Zoology, for instance, 
dwells on general principles, not on exceptional and 
startling creatures or on the lessons which their 
habits suggest for man ; Mathematics no longer 
lingers over the mystic qualities of numbers, nor 

1 See above, pp. i8 sqq. 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 



53 



does the astronomer seek to read our individual fate 
in the positions of the planets. But scientific truth has 
shown itself able to compete with fiction, and there 
is endless fascination for the modern mind in the con- 
templation of what former ages would have regarded 
as the most vulgar and tiresome commonplace. 

It was inevitable that attempts would be made to 
reduce history to a science by seeking for its laws and 
by reconstructing it upon the lines suggested by the 
natural sciences. The most celebrated instance of 
this is Buckle's uncompleted History of Civilization, 
the first volume of which appeared in 1857. It seemed 
to him that while the historical material which had 
been collected, when looked at in the aggregate, 
had ''a rich and imposing appearance,'' the real prob- 
lem of the historian had hardly been suspected, let 
alone solved. ''For all the higher purposes of human 
thought," he declares, ''history is still miserably 
deficient, and presents that confused and anarchical 
appearance natural to a subject of which the laws are 
unknown and even the foundations unsettled." He 
accordingly hoped, he tells us, to "accomphsh for 
the history of man something equivalent, or at all 
events analogous, to what has been effected by other 
inquirers for the different branches of natural science. 
In regard to nature, events apparently the most 
irregular and capricious have been explained, and have 
been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed 
and universal laws. This has been done because men 



54 THE NEW HISTORY 

of ability, and, above all, men of patient, untiring 
thought, have studied natural events with the view 
of discovering their regularity; and if human events 
were subjected to a similar treatment, we have every 
right to expect similar results." Buckle proposed 
to discover the laws, physical and mental, which 
govern the workings of mankind, and then trace their 
operations in the general development of civilization. 
Unlike Marx, Buckle beheved that physical laws 
tended to become well-nigh inoperative in so highly 
developed a civilization as that of Europe, and that, 
consequently, moral and intellectual laws should 
constitute the main object of the historian's search. 

Fifty years have elapsed since Buckle's book ap- 
peared, and I know of no historian who would venture 
to maintain that we had made any considerable 
advance toward the goal he set for himself. A sys- 
tematic prosecution of the various branches of social 
science, especially political economy, sociology, anthro- 
pology, and psychology, is succeeding in explaining 
many things ; but history must always remain, from 
the standpoint of the astronomer, physicist, or chemist, 
a highly inexact and fragmentary body of knowledge. 
This is due mainly to the fact that it concerns itself 
with man, his devious ways and wandering desires, 
which it seems hopeless at present to bring within the 
compass of clearly defined laws of any kind. Then 
our historical knowledge, as we have seen, must for- 
ever rest upon scattered and highly precarious data, 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 



55 



the truth of which we have often no means of 
testing. History can no doubt be pursued in a strictly 
scientific spirit, but the data we possess in regard to 
the past of mankind are not of a nature to lend 
themselves to organization into an exact science, 
although, as we shall see, they may yield truths of 
vital importance. 

The modern historical student is well aware of the 
treacherous nature of his materials and their woeful 
inadequacy, but even conscientious scholars have been 
accustomed, in writing for the public, to disguise 
their doubts and uncertainties. The exigencies of 
effective literary prese,ntation have forced them to 
conceal their pitiful ignorance and yield to the tempta- 
tion to ignore yawning chasms of nescience at whose 
brink heavy-footed History is forced to halt, although 
Literature is able to transcend them at a leap. It is 
largely an exaggerated and altogether false notion of 
the extent of our knowledge that has encouraged the 
reckless ventures of those who, like Buckle and Draper, 
have dreamed of reducing history to an exact science. 

Fifty years ago it was generally believed that we 
knew something about man from the very beginning. 
Of his abrupt appearance on the freshly created earth 
and his early conduct, there appeared to be a brief 
but exceptionally authoritative account. To-day 
we are beginning to recognize the immense antiquity 
of man. There are paleolithic implements which 
there is some reason for supposing may have been 



56 THE NEW HISTORY 

made a hundred or two hundred thousand years ago ; 
the eoKthic remains recently discovered may perhaps 
antedate the paleoHthic by an equally long period. 
These are mere guesses and impressions, of course, — ■ 
this assignment of millenniums, which appear to 
have been preceded by some hundreds of thousands of 
years during which an animal was developing with "a 
relatively enormous brain case, a skillful hand, and an 
inveterate tendency to throw stones, flourish sticks," 
and in general, as Ray Lankester expresses it, "to 
defeat aggression and satisfy his natural appetites 
by the use of his wits rather than by strength alone." 
There may still be historians who would argue that 
all this has nothing to do with history, — that it is 
"prehistoric." But "prehistoric" is a word that must 
go the way of " preadamite," which we used to hear. 
They both indicate a suspicion that we are in some way 
gaining illicit information about what happened be- 
fore the footlights were turned on and the curtain rose 
on the great human drama. Of the so-called "prehis- 
toric" period we, of course, know as yet very little in- 
deed, but the bare fact that there was such a period 
constitutes in itself the most momentous of historical 
discoveries. The earliest traces of an elaborate and 
advanced stage of human civilization — found in the 
Nile valley — can hardly be placed earlier than six 
thousand years ago. It is quite gratuitous, however, 
to assume that this was the first time that man had 
risen to such a stage of culture. 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 57 

Let US suppose that there has been something worth 
saying about the deeds and progress of mankind during 
the past three hundred thousand years at least; let 
us suppose that we were fortunate enough to have the 
merest outline of such changes as have overtaken our 
race during that period, and that a single page were 
devoted to each thousand years. Of the three hun- 
dred pages of our little manual the closing six or seven 
only would be allotted to the whole period for which 
records, in the ordinary sense of the word, exist, even 
in the scantiest and most fragmentary form. Or, to 
take another illustration, let us imagine history under 
the semblance of a vast lake into whose rather turbid 
depths we eagerly peer. We have reason to think it 
at least twenty-five feet deep, perhaps fifty or a hun- 
dred. We detect the very scantiest indications of life, 
rara et disjecta, four or five feet beneath the surface; 
six or seven inches down, these are abundant, but at 
that depth we can detect, so to speak, no movements 
of animate things, which are scarcely perceptible 
below three or four inches. If we are frank with 
ourselves, we shall have to admit that we can have no 
clear and adequate notion of anything happening 
more than an inch — indeed, scarce more than half 
an inch — below the surface. 

From this point of view the historian's gaze, instead 
of sweeping back into remote ages when the earth 
was young, seems to be confined to his own epoch; 
Rameses II, Tiglath-Pileser, and Solomon appear 



58 THE NEW HISTORY 

practically coeval with Caesar, Constantine, Charle-' 
magne, St. Louis, Charles V, and Victoria; Bacon, 
Newton, and Darwin are but the younger contempo- 
raries of Thales, Plato, and Aristotle. Let those pause 
who would attempt to determine the laws of human 
progress or decay. It is like trying to determine, by 
observing the conduct of a man of forty for a week, 
whether he be developing or not. Anything approach- 
ing an adequate record of events does not reach back 
for more than three thousand years, and even this 
remains distressingly imperfect and unreliable for more 
than two millenniums. We have a few, often highly 
fragmentary, literary histories covering Greek and 
Roman times, also a good many inscriptions and some 
important archaeological remains ; but these leave us 
in the dark upon many vital matters. The sources 
for the Roman Empire are so very bad that Mommsen 
refused to attempt to write its history. Only in the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries do the medieval 
annals and chronicles begin to be supplemented by 
miscellaneous documents which bring us more directly 
into contact with the life of the time. 

Yet the reader of history must often get the impres- 
sion that the sources of our knowledge are, so to speak, 
of a uniform volume and depth, at least for the last 
two or three thousand years. When he beholds a 
voluminous account of the early Church, or of the 
Roman Empire, or observes Dahn's or Hodgkin's 
many stately volumes on the Barbarian invasions, 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 59 

he is to be pardoned for assuming that the writers 
have spent years in painfully condensing and giving 
literary form to the abundant material which they 
have turned up in the course of their prolonged re- 
searches. Too few suspect that it has been the busi- 
ness of the historian in the past not to condense but, 
on the contrary, skillfully to inflate his thin film of 
knowledge until the bubble should reach such propor- 
tions that its bright hues would attract the attention 
and elicit the admiration of even the most careless 
observer. One volume of Hodgkin's rather old-fash- 
ioned Italy and her Invaders, had the scanty material 
been judiciously compressed, might have held all that 
we can be said to even half know about the matters to 
which the author has seen fit to devote eight volumes. 
But one should not jump to the conclusion that the 
historical writer is a sinner above all men. In the 
first place, it should never be forgotten that he is by 
long tradition a man of letters, and that that is not, 
after all, such a bad thing to be. In the second place, 
he experiences the same strong temptation that every 
one else does to accept at their face value the plaus- 
ible statements which he finds, unless they conflict 
with other accounts of the same events, or appear to 
be inherently improbable. Lastly, he is, like his fellow 
primates, the victim of what Nietzsche has called 
^Mream logic." I am sure that we do not reckon con- 
stantly enough with this inveterate tendency of even 
a highly cultivated mind instinctively to elaborate 



6o THE NEW HISTORY 

and amplify mere hints and suggestions into complete 
and vivid pictures. 

To take an illustration of Nietzsche's, the vague 
feeling, as we lie in bed, that the soles of our feet 
are free from the usual pressure to which we are ac- 
customed in our waking hours demands an explana- 
tion. Our dream explanation is that we are flying. 
Not satisfied to leave its work half done, dream logic 
fabricates a room or landscape in which we make our 
aerial experiments. Moreover, just as we are going 
to sleep or awaking we can often actually observe 
how a flash of light, such as sometimes appears on the 
retina of our closed eyes, will be involuntarily inter- 
preted as a vision of some human figure or other 
object, clear as a stereopticon sHde. Now any one 
can demonstrate to himself that neither dream logic 
nor the ''mind's-eye faculty," as it has been called, 
deserts us when we are awake. Indeed they may well 
be, as Nietzsche suspects, a portion of the inheritance 
bequeathed to us, along with some other inconven- 
iences, by our brutish forebears. At any rate they are 
forms of aberration against which the historian, with 
his literary traditions, needs specially to be on his 
guard. There are rumors that even the student of 
natural science sometimes keeps his ''mind's eye" too 
wide open, but he is by no means so likely as the his- 
torian to be misled by dream logic. This is not to be 
ascribed necessarily to the superior self-restraint of 
the scientist, but rather to the greater simplicity of 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 6l 

his task and the palpableness of much of his knowl- 
edge. 

It is essential, as has been pointed out, for every one 
dealing with the past of mankind to understand that 
history can never become a science in the sense that 
physics, chemistry, physiology, or even anthropology, 
is a science. The complexity of the phenomena is 
appalling, and we have no way of observing them di- 
rectly, to say nothing of artificially analyzing and 
experimenting with our facts. We know absolutely 
nothing of the occurrences in the history of mankind 
during a great part of his existence on the earth, and 
only since the invention of printing do our sources be- 
come in any sense abundant. Writers trained in the 
natural sciences, who have attempted to show histo- 
rians how to use their material, have commonly quite 
misunderstood the situation and the conditions under 
which the historian has necessarily to work.^ 

1 For example, Dr. Draper, in his well-known Intellectual Develop- 
ment of Europe, undertook to prove two great truths which he believed 
had escaped the historians : that " social advancement is as completely 
under the control of natural law as is bodily growth," and that "the 
life of an individual is a miniature of the hfe of a nation." Nowhere 
does he suggest that he exercised the least care in collecting the evi- 
dence for these hazardous propositions ; nowhere in his volumes does 
he allude to any sources of information in regard to a past which he 
claims to interpret in its scientific relations. Not long ago a Boston 
physician published a work on heredity in which he denounces the utter 
superficiality of historians and then proceeds to build up a theory of 
royal heredity based on the data found in that ancient household 
convenience, Thomas's Biographical Dictionary. 



62 THE NEW HISTORY 



VII 



But history, in order to become scientific, had first 
to become historical. Singularly enough, what we 
now regard as the strictly historical interest was 
almost missed by historians before the nineteenth 
century. They narrated such past events as they 
believed would interest the reader; they commented 
on these with a view of instructing him. They took 
some pains to find out how things really were — wie es 
eigentlich gewesen. To this extent they were scientific, 
although their motives were mainly literary, moral, or 
religious. They did not, however, in general try to 
determine how things had come about— me es 
eigentlich geworden. History has remained for two or 
three thousand years mainly a record of past events, 
and this definition satisfies the thoughtless still. But 
it is one thing to describe what once was ; it is still 
another to attempt to determine how it came about. 

It is impossible here to trace the causes and gradual 
development of this genetic interest. The main reason 
for its present strength lies probably in our modern 
lively consciousness of the reahty and inevitabihty of 
change, examples of which are continually forcing them- 
selves upon our attention. The Greek historians had 
little or no background for their narratives. It is 
amazing to note the contemptuous manner in which 
Thucydides rejects all accounts of even the immedi- 
ately preceding generations, as mere uncertain tradi- 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 63 

tions. Polybius set himself the task of tracing the 
gradual extension of the Roman dominion, but there 
is no indication that he had any clear idea of the con- 
tinuity of history. In the Middle Ages there was un- 
doubtedly a notion that the earth was the scene of a 
divine drama which was to have its denouement in the 
dcfmitive separation of the wheat from the tares ; but 
this supernatural unity of history was not scientific 
but theological. In earthly matters the medieval man 
could hardly have understood the meaning of the 
word " anachronism" ; the painters of the Renaissance 
did not hesitate to place a crucifix over the manger of 
the divine infant, and there appears to have been 
nothing incongruous in this to their contemporaries. 

Not until the eighteenth century did the possibility 
of indefinite human progress become the exhilarating 
doctrine of reformers, a class which had previously 
attacked existing abuses in the name of the ''good 
old times." No discovery could be more momentous 
and fundamental than that reform should seek its 
sanction in the future, not in the past ; in advance, 
not in reaction.^ It became clearer and clearer that 
the world did change, and by the middle of the nine- 
teenth century the continuity of history began to 
be accepted by the more thoughtful students of the 
past, and began to affect, as never before, their motives 
and methods of research. 

1 Sec the final essay in this volume, on " The Spirit of Conserva- 
tism in the Light of History." 



64 THE NEW HISTORY 



I 



The doctrine of the continuity of history is based 
upon the observed fact that every human institution, 
every generally accepted idea, every important in- 
vention, is but the summation of long lines of progress, 
reaching back as far as we have the patience or 
means to follow them. The jury, the drama, the 
Gatling gun, the papacy, the letter S, the doctrine of 
stare decisis, each owes its present form to ante- 
cedents which can be scientifically traced. But 
no human interest is isolated from innumerable con- 
current interests and conditioning circumstances. 
This brings us to the broader conception of the con- 
tinuity of change which is attributable to the com- 
plexity of men's affairs. A somewhat abrupt change 
may take place in some single institution or habit, 
but a sudden general change is almost inconceivable. 
An individual may, through some modification of 
his environment, through bereavement or malignant 
disease, be quickly and fundamentally metamor- 
phosed, but even such cases are rare. If all the habits 
and interests of the individual are considered, it will 
be found that only in the most exceptional cases are 
any great number of these altered in the twinkling 
of an eye. And society for obvious reasons is in- 
finitely more conservative than the individual. 
Now — and this cannot be too strongly emphasized 
— the continuity of history is a scientific truth, the 
attempt to trace the slow process of change is a scien- 
tific problem, and one of the most fascinating in its 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 65 

nature./ It is the discovery and application of this 
law which has served to differentiate history from 
literature and morals, and which has raised it, in one 
sense, to the dignity of a science. 

VIII 

The rapidly developing specialization in history, 
which is the result of more exacting scientific stand- 
ards, forces upon the historical student a new and 
fundamental question. If all departments of knowl- 
edge have now become historical, what need is there 
of history in general ? If poKtics, war, art, law, reli- 
gion, science, literature, be dealt with genetically, will 
not history tend inevitably to disintegrate into its 
organic elements? Professor Seeley of the Univer- 
sity of Cambridge beheved that it would. , Twenty 
years ago he declared that history^was after all but 
the name of '' a residuum which has been left when one 
group of facts after another has been taken possession 
of by some science ; that residuum which now exists 
must go the way of the rest, and that time is not very 
distant when a science will take possession of the facts 
which are still the undisputed property of the his- 
torian." 

Now the last question that I have to discuss is 
whether history, after gaining the whole world, is 
destined to lose her own soul. Let us assume that 
historical specialization has done its perfect work, 



66 THE NEW HISTORY 

that every distinct phase of man's past, every insti- 
tution, sentiment, conception, discovery, achieve- 
ment, or defeat which is recorded has found its place 
in the historical treatment of the particular branch of 
research to which it has been assigned according to the 
prevailing classification of the sciences. This process 
of specialization would serve to rectify history in a 
thousand ways, and to broaden and deepen its opera- 
tions, but, instead of destroying it, it would rather 
tend, on the contrary, to demonstrate with perfect 
clearness its absolute indispensability. Human affairs 
and human changes do not lend themselves to an 
exhaustive treatment through a series of monographs 
upon the ecclesiastical or military organization of 
particular societies, their legal procedure, agrarian 
system, their art, domestic habits, or views on higher 
education. Many vital matters would prove highly 
recalcitrant when one attempted to force them into 
a neat, scientific cubby-hole. Physical, moral, and 
intellectual phenomena are mysteriously interacting 
in that process of hfe and change which it falls to 
the historian to study and describe. 

Man is far more than the sum of his scientifically 
classifiable operations. Water is composed of hydro- 
gen and oxygen, but it is not like either of them. 
Nothing could be more artificial than the scientific 
separation of man's religious, aesthetic, economic, 
political, intellectual, and belHcose properties. These 
may be studied, each by itself, with advantage, but 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 67 

specialization would lead to the most absurd results 
if there were not some one to study the process as a 
whole ; and that some one is the historian. Imagine 
the devotees of the various social sciences each en- 
gaged in describing his particular interest in the 
Crusades, or the Protestant Revolt, or the French 
Revolution. When they had finished, would not the 
historian have to retell the story, utilizing all that 
they had accomplished, including what they had all 
omitted, and rectifying the errors into which each 
of the specialists had fallen on account of his igno- 
rance of the general situation ? 

It would seem at first sight as if those most familiar 
with each special subject of research — such as con- 
stitutional law, botany, theology, philology, painting, 
chemistry, economics, medicine — would be the only 
properly quaHfied persons to trace its history; but 
the scientific speciahst is likely to suffer from two dis- 
advantages. In the first place, his very famiharity 
with the principles of his particular branch of knowl- 
edge makes it difficult for him to conceive remote and 
unfamihar conditions which historically lie back of 
the conceptions which he entertains. In the second 
place, the discovery, use, and interpretation of his- 
torical material seem to require a somewhat prolonged 
and special training, which only the professional his- 
torical student is hkely to possess. He is constantly 
shocked by a certain awkwardness which those inex- 
perienced in historical research are almost sure to 



68 THE NEW HISTORY 

betray. They make mistakes which he would not 
make, in spite of their greater knowledge of the sub- 
ject with which they are dealing. This doubtless 
accounts for the fact that we have as yet no tolerably 
satisfactory history of natural science, or even of its 
special branches. There are, moreover, certain im- 
portant phases of human thought and endeavor where 
the trained historian will have no particular difficulty 
in mastering the technical detail sufficiently to deal 
satisfactorily with them. Indeed, even the most 
subtle of the modern sciences, not excluding mathe- 
matics, were sufficiently simple two hundred years 
ago to enable a well-equipped historical student, with 
some taste for a particular human interest, to trace its 
development down until very recent times. So it may 
fall out, as time goes on, that historical students will 
tend to specialize more and more, and will supply the 
deficiency which students of contemporary branches 
of science are not ordinarily in a position to satisfy, 
— but more will be said on this subject, especially 
in regard to intellectual history, in a later essay. 

I have frankly revealed the historian's ignorance ; 
he recognizes this in all humility, and is making every 
effort to remedy it by the application of highly scien- 
tific methods. He shares it, moreover, with the repre- 
sentatives of all the social sciences who attempt to 
carry their work back into the past. The historian 
will become more and more interested, I beheve, in 
explaining the immediate present, and fortunately 



THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 69 

his sources for the last two or three centuries are in- 
finitely more abundant and satisfactory than for the 
whole earher history of the world. He is criticizing 
and indexing his sources and rendering them available 
to an extent which would astonish a layman unf amihar 
with the tremendous amount that has been accom- 
phshed in this respect during the past fifty years. 

We have now seethed the kid in its mother's milk. 
We have explained history by means of history. 
The historian, from a narrow, scientific point of view, 
is a httle higher than a man of letters and a good deal 
lower than an astronomer or a biologist. He need not, 
however, repudiate his hterary associations, for they 
are eminently respectable, but he will aspire hereafter 
to find out, not only exactly how things have been, but 
how they have come about. He will remain the 
critic and guide of the social sciences whose results he 
must synthesize and test by the actual fife of mankind 
as it appears in the past. His task is so fascinating 
and so comprehensive that it will doubtless gradually 
absorb his whole energies and wean him in time from 
literature, for no poet or dramatist ever set before 
himself a nobler or a more inspiring ideal, or one 
making more demands upon the imagination and 
resources of expression, than the destiny which is 
becoming clearer and clearer to the historian. 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 



That history must from time to time be rewritten 
is an oft-repeated commonplace. Why is this ? The 
past, as ordinarily conceived, seems fixed and settled 
enough. No theologian has ever conceded to omnipo- 
tence itself the power to change it. Why may it 
not then be described for good and all by any one who 
has the available information at his disposal? The 
historian would answer that more and more is being 
learned about the past as time goes on, that old errors 
are constantly being detected and rectified and new 
points of view discovered, so that the older accounts 
of events and conditions tend to be superseded by 
better and more accurate ones. This is obvious; 
but granting that each new generation of historians 
do their duty in correcting the mistakes of their 
predecessors, is that all that is necessary ? Is there 
not danger that they will allow themselves to be too 
largely guided in the choice of their material and in 
their judgments of it by the examples set by preceding 
writers ? Are historians now adjusting themselves as 
promptly as they should to the unprecedented amount 
of new knowledge in regard to mankind in general 

70 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 71 

which has been accumulating during the past genera- 
tion, and to the fundamental change of attitude that 
is taking place in our views of man and society ? 

The usual training which a historical student re- 
ceives has a tendency to give him the impression that 
history is a far more fixed and definite thing than it 
really is. He is aware that various elaborate attempts 
have been made to establish the Begrijff und Wesen 
of history, that its methodology has been the theme 
of a number of treatises, and that its supposed bound- 
aries have been jealously defended from the dreaded 
encroachments of rival sciences. Moreover, he finds 
the general spirit and content of historical works 
pretty uniform, and he is to be forgiven for inferring 
that he has to do with a tolerably well-defined sub- 
ject matter which may be investigated according to 
a clear and prescribed set of rules. I am incKned, 
however, to think that this attitude of mind is the 
result of a serious misapprehension which stands in 
the way of the proper development of historical study. 
Before proceeding we must therefore stop a moment 
to consider the vague meaning of the term '^history." 

In the first place, history has itself a long and varied 
history, which was sketched briefly in the preceding 
essay. Its subject matter, its purposes, and its 
methods have exhibited in the past a wide range of 
variation which suggest many future possibihties 
when we once perceive the underlying causes of these 
changes. It has, as we have seen, somewhat reluc- 



72 THE NEW HISTORY 

tantly and partially adapted itself to the general out- 
look of successive periods, and as times changed, it 
has changed. In the second place, the scope of his- 
torical investigation, as actually carried on at the 
present day by those who deem themselves historians, 
is so wide as to preclude the possibility of bringing 
it into any clearly defined category. The historian 
may choose, for example, like Gibbon, to extract 
from Procopius's ^' improbable story " of Alaric's 
capture of Rome the circumstances which have an 
air of probability. He may seek to determine the 
prevalence of malaria in ancient Greece, or to decide 
whether the humidity of Asia Minor has altered since 
the days of Croesus, or to trace the effects of the issue 
of some forty billions of francs of paper money in 
France between 1789 and 1800. As for method, a 
peculiar training is essential to determine the diver- 
gence between a so-called " eolith " and an ordinary 
chip of flint which does not owe its form to human 
adaptation ; and another kind of training is required 
to edit a satisfactory edition of Roger Bacon's Opus 
Majus. A judicious verdict on the originality of 
Luther's interpretation of the words justitia dei, 
in Romans, i. 17, demands antecedent studies which 
would be inappropriate if one were seeking the motives 
for Bismarck's interest in insurance for the aged and 
incapacitated. I think that one may find solace and 
intellectual repose in surrendering all attempts to 
define history, and in conceding that it is the business 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 73 

of the historian to find out anything about mankind 
in the past which he believes to be interesting or 
important and about which there are sources of 
information. 

Furthermore, history's chances of getting ahead 
and of doing good are dependent on its refraining 
from setting itself off as a separate discipline and 
undertaking to defend itself from the encroachments 
of seemingly hostile sciences which now and then 
appear within its territory. To do this is to mis- 
apprehend the conditions of scientific advance. No 
set of investigators can any longer claim exclusive 
jurisdiction in even the tiniest scientific field, and 
nothing indeed would be more fatal to them than the 
successful defense of any such claim. The bounds of 
all departments of human research and speculation 
are inherently provisional, indefinite, and fluctuating ; 
moreover, the lines of demarcation are hopelessly 
interlaced, for real men and the real universe in which 
they live are so intricate as to defy all attempts even 
of the most patient and subtle German to establish 
satisfactorily and permanently the Begriff und Wesen 
of any artificially delimited set of natural phenom- 
ena, whether words, thoughts, deeds, forces, animals, 
plants, or stars. Each so-called science or discipline 
is ever and always dependent on other sciences and 
disciplines. It draws its Hfe from them, and to them 
it owes, consciously or unconsciously, a great part of 
its chances of progress. 



74 THE NEW HISTORY 

As Professor J. F. Kemp has so graciously said of his 
own subject, geology, it could not have matured with- 
out the aid of those sister sciences which necessarily 
preceded it. ''The great, round world in its entirety 
cannot be grasped otherwise than with the assistance 
of physics, mechanics, astronomy, chemistry, zoology, 
and botany." Not only was geology in its earlier 
growth ''based upon the sister sciences, but now 
progresses with them, leans largely upon them for 
support, and in return repays its debt by the contri- 
butions which it makes to each. " The historical 
student should take a similar attitude toward his own 
vast field of research. If history is to reach its high- 
est development it must surrender all individualistic 
aspirations and recognize that it is but one of several 
ways of studying mankind. It must confess that, 
like geology, biology, and most other sciences, it is 
based on sister sciences, that it can only progress 
with them, must lean largely on them for support, 
and in return should repay its debt by the contribu- 
tions which it makes to our general understanding of 
our species. Whatever history may or may not be, 
it always concerns itself with man. Would it not 
then be the height of folly and arrogance for the his- 
torian to neglect the various discoveries made about 
man by those who study him in ways different from 
those of the traditional student of the past ? 

In order to understand the present plight of the 
historian we must go back to the middle of the nine- 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 75 

teenth century, when for the first time history began 
clearly to come under the influence of the modern 
scientific spirit. Previously, as we have seen, it had 
been a branch of literature with distinctly literary 
aims, — when it was not suborned in the interest of 
theological theories or called upon to stimulate patri- 
otic pride and emulation. But about sixty years ago 
a new era in historical investigation opened which has 
witnessed achievements of a character to justify in a 
measure the complacency in which historians now and 
then indulge. The most obvious of these achieve- 
ments seem to me to be four in number, and the his- 
torian owes all of them, if I am not mistaken, largely 
to the example and influence of natural science. He 
undertook, in the first place, to test and examine his 
sources of information far more critically than ever 
before, and rejected partially or wholly many authori- 
ties upon which his predecessors had relied implicitly. 
Secondly, he resolved to tell the truth Hke a man, 
regardless of whose feeHngs it might hurt. Thirdly, 
he began to realize the overwhelming importance of 
the inconspicuous, the common, and often obscure 
elements in the past; the homely, everyday, and 
normal as over against the rare, spectacular, and 
romantic, which had engaged the attention of most 
earHer writers. Fourthly, he began to spurn super- 
natural, theological, and anthropocentric explanations, 
which had been the stock-in-trade of the philosophers 
of history. I do not propose to dwell upon these 



76 THE NEW HISTORY 

achievements, for no one will be inclined to question 
their fundamental character. They have cost a tre- 
mendous amount of labor, and they were the essential 
preliminaries to any satisfactory progress. Are they, 
however, more than essential preliminaries ? Do 
they not, on examination, prove to be rather negative 
in character? To resolve to tell the truth about 
what you have taken pains to verify according to 
your best abiHty; to reckon with the regular and 
normal rather than with the exceptional and sensa- 
tional; and to give up appeahng to God and the devil 
as historical explanations, are but preparations for 
the rewriting of history. They furnish the necessary 
conditions rather than the program of progress. 
Moreover, they are by no means all of the necessary 
conditions. Still further preparations are essential 
before the historian can hope to understand the past. 
Professor William I. Thomas well says: — 

The general acceptance of an evolutionary point of view of 
life and the world has already deeply affected psychology, phi- 
losophy, morality, education, sociology, and all the sciences deal- 
ing with man. This view involves a recognition of the fact that 
not a single situation in life can be completely understood in its 
immediate aspects alone. Everything is to be regarded as 
having an origin and a development, and we cannot afford to 
overlook the genesis and stages of change. For instance, the 
psychologist or the neurologist does not at present attempt to 
understand the working and structure of the human brain 
through the adult brain alone. He supplements his studies of 
the adult brain by observations on the workings of the infant 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 77 

mind, or by an examination of the structure of the infant brain. 
And he goes farther than this from the immediate aspects of 
the problem — he examines the mental Hfe and the brain of the 
monkey, the dog, the rat, the fish, the frog, and of every form 
of life possessing a nervous system, down to those having only 
a single cell, and at every point he has a chance of catching a 
suggestion of the meaning of the brain structure and of mind. 
In the lower orders of brain the structure and meaning are writ 
large, and by working up from the simpler to the more complex 
types, and noting the modification of structure and function 
point by point, the student is finally able to understand the 
frightfully intricate human organ, or has the best chance of 
doing so. 

It would seem as if this discovery of the incalculable 
value of genetic reasoning should have come from the 
historians, but, curiously enough, instead of being the 
first to appreciate the full significance of historical- 
mindedness, they left it to be brought forward by 
the zoologists, botanists, and geologists. Worse yet, 
it is safe to say that, although the natural scientists 
have fully developed it, the historian has hitherto 
made only occasional use of the discovery, and history 
is still less rigidly historical than comparative anatomy 
or social psychology. Even in recent historical works 
one finds descriptions of events and conditions, which 
make it clear that the writer has failed to perceive 
that all things have an origin and a development, 
that we cannot afford to overlook their genesis and 
stages of change, *'that not a single situation in life 
can be completely understood in its immediate as- 



78 THE NEW HISTORY 

pects alone." Of course the historian has long talked 
of the ''rise" and ''fall" of empires, the "growth" 
and "decay" of institutions; he has of late devoted 
much attention to the development of institutions, 
and to this extent he adopts a genetic treatment; 
but none the less there lies back of all his work the 
long tradition of what we may call the episodal treat- 
ment of the past. He is still discovered making the 
futile attempt to describe wie es eigentlich gewesen 
without knowing wie es eigentlich geworden. The 
popular misunderstanding of the French Revolution, 
for instance, is due to the anxiety of the historian to 
depict the striking events from 1789 onward rather 
than to interpret them in the light of their antecedents, 
which are commonly dispatched in an introductory 
chapter which furnishes no sufficient clue to what 
follows. The "Renaissance" has been pretty com- 
pletely misconceived, owing to the ignorance of 
Burckhardt and Symonds in regard to the previous 
period. The culture of the Middle Ages in turn re- 
mains a mystery to one who has not scrupulously 
studied the Weltanschauung of the fourth century. 

The historian still puts himself in the position of 
one who should wake up in a strange bed and hope 
to comprehend his situation by taking a careful in- 
ventory of the furniture of his room. The strange- 
ness can only be dispelled and the situation under- 
stood by falling back on the past — in this case a 
simple historical consideration such as that one had, 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 79 

on his way from Chicago to San Francisco, been de- 
layed and obliged to spend the night in Ogden. 
Should the historian give us, for instance, the most 
minute description of the conditions in the village of 
Salem in the year 1692, telling us just where Goody 
Bishop's cellar walls stood in which the fatal '' pop- 
pets" were found, and pointing out the spot where 
Nehemiah Abbot's ox met an untimely and sus- 
picious end by choking on a turnip, we should still 
fail to grasp this lamentable crisis in the affairs of 
New England, for the really vital question is, Why 
did our godly ancestors hang old women for alleged 
commerce with the devil? Only some knowledge 
of comparative religions and of the history of the 
Christian church can make that plain. Cotton 
Mather was the victim of a complex of squahd super- 
stitions which the Protestant reformers had done 
nothing whatever to reduce or attenuate.^ He is not 
to be understood by even the most prayerful study 
of his immediate surroundings. 

The modern historical student's tendency to special- 
ization, his aspiration to master some single field, 
often stands in the way of his really understanding 
even what he seems to know most about. The 
difference between the best historical writing, which 
is rare enough, and the ordinary run of histories, lies 
in the historical-mindedness of the author. This is 
susceptible of far greater development than it has 

* See below, pp. 117 sqq. 



8o THE NEW HISTORY 

hitherto received/ for it should ultimately permeate 
all historical treatises that pretend to be both con- 
structive and instructive and do not merely confine 
themselves to the accumulation of the raw material 
of history. 

Historical-mindedness is by no means the only great 
debt that historians owe to workers in fields seemingly 
remote from theirs. Two historical facts of tran- 
scendent importance were discovered in the latter half 
of the nineteenth century. Neither of them was in 
any way attributable to historians. It was the zool- 
ogist who proved that man is sprung from the lower 
animals, and it was an EngHsh geologist who first 
clearly and systematically brought together the evi- 
dence that man has been sojourning on the earth, 
not for six thousand years only, but mayhap for six 
hundred thousand. The methods and outlook of 
the historian prevented him from making these dis- 
coveries. He may exonerate himself for his failure 
to suspect these truths on the ground that the data 
used to establish man's animal ancestry and his vast 
antiquity are wholly unfamiHar to him. Granting 

1 An interesting paper could be written on the common view enter- 
tained by historians that it is impossible to write the history of our 
own times ; that historical methods cannot be applied to recent events. 
Those who at one moment proclaim this doctrine at the next will 
freely acknowledge Thucydides, who confined himself to his own time, 
to be the greatest of all historians ! It is most essential that we should 
understand our own time ; we can only do so through history, and it 
is the obvious duty of the historian to meet this, his chief obligation. 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 8l 

the propriety of this excuse, it may be asked whether 
he has seriously reckoned with these two momentous 
facts after they were pointed out to him by Darwin, 
Lyell, and others. He has certainly been slow to do 
so. They were new to the last generation of histo- 
rians, and they would have seemed quite irrelevant 
to Ranke or Bancroft in their undertakings. Even 
to-day I find that members of the guild are some of 
them inclined to deny that man's descent from the 
lower animals is, strictly speaking, an historical fact, 
although they would concede that Henry II's descent 
from William the Conqueror is such. 

What is more important, most historical students 
would frankly confess that they saw no way in which 
man's descent or his long sojourn on the earth could 
be brought into any obvious relation with the prob- 
lems on which they were engaged. In this they would 
be quite right. It is certainly true that most histori- 
cal investigation can be carried on mthout reference 
to man's origin. If one is endeavoring to determine 
whether Charles the Fat was in Ingelheim or Lustnau 
on July I, 887, it makes Kttle difference whether the 
emperor's ancestors talked with their Creator in the 
cool of the evening or went on all fours and slept in 
a tree. If one is locating the sites of French forts 
on the Ohio River or describing the causes of Marie 
Antoinette's repugnance for Mirabeau, the jaw of the 
Heidelberg man may safely be neglected. Whole 
fields of historical research can be cultivated not only 



82 THE NEW HISTORY 

without any regard to man's origin, but without any 
attempt to understand man as such. But there are 
many other, and perhaps even more important, fields, 
as I trust may become apparent later, in which it is 
essential that the investigator should know everything 
that is being found out about man, unless he is willing 
to run the risk of superficiahty and error. ^ 

1 In order to avoid the suspicion that I am misrepresenting the 
position of what may be called the orthodox historical student I beg to 
call the reader's attention to an address delivered by Professor George 
Burton Adams of Yale before the American Historical Association, 
December 29, 1908. He describes what, for convenience, he calls five 
hostile movements directed against the methods, results, and ideals 
of the established political historian. These "attacks" proceed from 
political science, geography, political economy, sociology, and "folk- 
psychology." "For more than fifty years," he says, "the historian 
has had possession of the field and has deemed it his sufficient mission 
to determine what the fact was, including the immediate conditions 
that gave it shape. Now he finds himself confronted with numerous 
groups of aggressive and confident workers in the same field who ask 
not what was the fact — many of them seem to be comparatively little 
interested in that — but their constant question is what is the ulti- 
mate explanation of history, or, more modestly, what are the forces 
that determine human events and according to what laws do they 
act ? This is nothing else than a new flaming up of interest in the 
philosophy, or the science, of history. . . . The emphatic assertion 
which they all make is that history is the orderly progression of man- 
kind toward a definite end, and that we may know and state the laws 
which control the actions of men in organized society. This is the one 
common characteristic of all the groups I have described ; and it is of 
each of them the one most prominent characteristic" (American His- 
torical Review, January, 1909). It is the aim of the present essay to 
put the whole situation in a different light from that in which Profes- 
sor Adams presents it. 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 83 

II 

While, then, the historian has been busy doing his 
best to render history scientific, he has, as we have 
seen, left the students of nature to illustrate to the 
full the advantages of historical-mindedness and to 
make two discoveries about mankind infinitely more 
revolutionary than all that Giesebrecht, Waitz, 
Martin, or Hodgkin ever found out about the 
past. To-day, he has obviously not only to adjust 
himself as fast as he can to these new elements in the 
general intellectual situation, but he must decide 
what shall be his attitude toward a considerable num- 
ber of newer sciences of man which, by freely applying 
the evolutionary theory, have progressed marvelously 
and are now in a position to rectify many of the com- 
monly accepted conclusions of the historian and to 
disabuse his mind of many ancient misapprehensions. 
By the newer sciences of man I mean, first and fore- 
most. Anthropology, in a comprehensive sense. Pre- 
historic archaeology, Social and Animal psychology, 
and the Comparative study of reHgions. PoHtical 
economy has already had its effects on history, and 
as for Sociology, it seems to me a highly important 
point of view rather than a body of discoveries about 
mankind. These newer social sciences, each studying 
man in its own particular way, have entirely changed 
the meaning of many terms which the historian has 
been accustomed to use in senses now discredited — 



84 THE NEW HISTORY 

such words as "race," "religion/' "progress," "the 
ancients," "culture," and "human nature." They 
have vitiated many of the cherished conclusions of 
mere historians and have served to explain historical 
phenomena which the historian could by no possibil- 
ity have rightly interpreted with the means at his dis- 
posal. Let us begin with prehistoric archseology. 

The conservative historian might be tempted to 
object at the start that however important the develop- 
ment of man would seem to be before the opening of 
history, we can unfortunately know practically noth- 
ing about it, owing to the almost total lack of docu- 
ments and records. Archaeology has, of course, he 
would admit, revealed a few examples of man's handi- 
work which may greatly antedate the earliest finds 
in Egyptian tombs ; some skulls and bones and even 
skeletons have been found, and no one famihar with the 
facts doubts that man was hving on the earth thou- 
sands of years before the Egyptian civilization devel- 
oped. But what can be known about him, except the 
shape of his jaw and the nature of his stone and bone 
utensils, which alone survive from remote periods? 
If we feel ill-informed about the time of Diocletian or 
Clovis, how baseless must be our conjectures in regard 
to the habits of the cave man ! 

It is certainly true that the home hfe of the cave 
man is still veiled in obscurity and is likely to remain 
so. Nevertheless, the mass of information in regard to 
mankind before the appearance of the earliest sur- 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 85 

viving inscriptions has already assumed imposing 
proportions. Its importance is perhaps partially 
disguised by the unfortunate old term "prehistoric." 
The historian glances at case after case of flint eo- 
liths, fist hatchets, arrow points, and scrapers, pic- 
tures of animals scratched on bits of bone, fragments of 
neolithic pottery and bronze ''celts," with emotions of 
weariness tempered by some slight contempt for those 
who see anything more in these things than the proofs 
that there used to be savages long ago similar to those 
that may still be found in regions remote from civiliza- 
tion. Further reflection should, however, convince 
him that the distinction between ''historic" and "pre- 
historic" is after all an arbitrary one. "Prehistoric" 
originally meant such information as we had about 
man before his story was taken up by Moses and 
Homer, when they were deemed the earliest surviving 
written sources. 

History, however, in the fullest sense of the term, 
includes all that we know of the past of mankind, re- 
gardless of the nature of our sources of information. 
Archaeological sources, to which the student of the 
earlier history of man is confined, are not only fre- 
quently superior in authenticity to many written 
documents, but they continue to have the greatest 
importance after the appearance of inscriptions and 
books. We now accept as historical a great many 
things which are recorded neither in inscriptions nor in 
books. It is an historical, not a prehistorical, fact that 



86 THE NEW HISTORY 

the earliest well-defined and unmistakable human tool, 
the fist hatchet, was used in southern Europe, in 
Africa, India, Japan, and North America. This is 
exactly as historical as the recorded word that Julius 
Csesar first crossed the English Channel at the full of 
the moon — and far more important. 

Should the historical student still find himself in- 
different to what has been called palethnolggy,^ let 
him recollect that if, as it is not hazardous to assume, 
the oldest fist hatchets were made by men living two 
hundred thousand years ago, the so-called '' historical" 
period of from five to seven thousand years has to do 
with but a thirtieth or a fortieth of the time man has 
been slowly and intermittently estabhshing the founda- 
tions of our present civilization. But the fist hatchet 
is, comparatively speaking, a highly perfected imple- 
ment and is pretty well diffused over the globe, so that 
it suggests a vista of antecedent progress which sepa- 
rates man's speechless and toolless ancestors from the 
makers of the fist hatchets. It must be clear that if 
one ignores palethnology, one runs the risk of missing 
the whole perspective of modern change. We have out- 
grown the scale which served for Archbishop Usher, 

1 The term " prehistoric " and some such term as palethnology (sug- 
gested by de Mortillet) are still convenient, since the attempt to trace 
the stages of development of man previous to the appearance of the 
higher, and really very recent, forms of civilization which first meet 
us in Egypt and Babylonia involves a particular technical equipment, 
including, for instance, some acquaintance with geology and paleon- 
tology. 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 87 

who maintained that man and all the terrestrial ani- 
mals were created on Friday, October 28, 4004 b.c, 
and which has led to a great deal of shallow talk about 
our relation to 'Hhe ancients" who are in reahty our 
contemporaries. 

It seems quite possible — to suggest a single re- 
flection—that human mental capacity has neither 
increased nor declined during the trifling period which 
separates us from Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, could 
we imagine a colony of infants from the first famihes of 
Athens in the fifth century b.c, and another the off- 
spring of the most intellectual classes of to-day, com- 
pletely isolated from civilization and suckled by wolves 
or fed by ravens, both groups would start in a stage 
of decivilization suggesting that of the chimpanzee. 
No one can tell how long it would take the supreme 
geniuses which such colonies might from time to time 
produce, to frame a sentence, build a fire, or chip a 
nodule of flint into a fist hatchet. Nor is there reason 
to think that either colony would have an advantage 
over the other in making the first steps in progress. 
It is only education and social environment that 
separate the best of us from a savagery far lower than 
any to be observed on the earth to-day, lower prob- 
ably than that of the lowest man of whom any traces 
still exist. 

Then there is the word ''race," which historical 
writers have used and still use with great recklessness. 
Most of the earlier theories of ''races " and of the oridn 



83 THE NEW HISTORY 

of man in western Asia were either consciously sug- 
gested, or unconsciously reenforced, by the account in 
Genesis of the Garden of Eden, the Deluge, and the 
confounding of language during the construction of the 
Tower of Babel. The Aryan theory set forth, for ex- 
ample, by Mommsen in the opening chapter of his 
Roman History, to-day appears well-nigh as naive and 
grotesque as the earHer notion of the Tower of Babel. 
Since the geological period when man may first have 
made his appearance on the earth, there have been vast 
changes in the distribution of land and water, in cH- 
mate and fauna. These natural changes in physical 
conditions must have caused all sorts of migrations 
and fusions ; add to these, conquests and invasions, 
slavery and miscellaneous sexual relations. These 
have brought the most varied peoples together and 
produced an inextricable confusion of morals, manners, 
and tongues. In spite of this, one still finds historical 
students talking of ''races" as if we could still beheve 
Max Mailer's persuasive tale of the plain of Iran and 
the dispersion of the Aryans. 

These illustrations should be sufficient to substan- 
tiate the importance of prehistoric archaeology for all 
students of history, since they all run grave risks of 
persisting in ancient error if they neglect its results. 
We are, however, by no means confined to the remains 
of man and his handiwork for our notions of what must 
have lain back of the highly developed civilizations 
which we meet when written records first become avail- 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 89 

able. If, as Professor William Thomas has so happily 
phrased it, '^tribal society is virtually delayed civiliza- 
tion, and the savages are a sort of contemporaneous 
ancestry," those investigators — namely, the anthro- 
pologists — who deal with the habits, customs, insti- 
tutions, languages, and beliefs of primitive man are in 
a position to make the greatest contributions to the 
real understanding of history. From the standpoint 
of man's development, anthropology may be regarded 
as a branch of history in the same sense that animal 
psychology or comparative anatomy are branches of 
human psychology and human anatomy. 

At least one historian of repute has recognized the 
truth of this. Professor Eduard Meyer prefaces 
the second greatly revised edition of his History of 
Antiquity with a whole volume of 250 pages on the 
'^Elements of Anthropology." He says: ^'To have 
prefaced my work with such an introduction would 
formerly have excited the surprise and encountered 
the criticism of many of my judges at a time when the 
interests of most historians were entirely alien to such 
questions. Now, when such matters are the order of 
the day, no apology is necessary. . . . Indeed, such 
an introduction is absolutely essential for a scientific 
and consistently conceived history of antiquity." 

The helpfulness of anthropology for the historical 
student is, however, still much obscured, owing partly 
to his indifference to the whole question of human 
development, and partly to a more or less justifiable 



go 



THE NEW HISTORY 



suspicion on his part that there is grave danger of being 
misled in our attempt to interpret past events and 
conditions by anthropological theories and schematism. 
It is one thing, however, to reject a tool because we 
are too stupid to see its use, and another to be on our 
guard against cutting ourselves. Even the historical 
student who is stoHdly and complacently engaged in 
determining past facts (except when he puts on the 
armor of the Lord to defend the lawful frontiers of 
history against invaders) would surely find the study 
of anthropology of value. It would tend to give him 
poise and insight, preeminently in all matters having 
to do with religion or religious sanction, or the under- 
lying forces of conservatism, — and with these subjects 
he is constantly engaged in one form or another. No 
branch of modern research, indeed, has so upset older 
historical conceptions as the comparative study of 
religions, a science which is quasi-historical and quasi- 
anthropological in its sources and methods. The 
older historians failed to see very deeply into reli- 
gious phenomena; manifestations of that class were 
commonly taken for granted, and their origins excited 
little curiosity. Yet few phases of human develop- 
ment have proved to be more expHcable than the reli- 
gious. The complex syncretism which resulted in 
orthodox Christianity has been laid bare, as well as 
the very ancient and primitive superstitions which 
were incorporated into the theology of the church 
fathers. 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 91 

I have been told by M. Solomon Reinach, the dis- 
tinguished director of the Museum of St. Germain-en- 
Laye, that when Mommsen visited the collections 
some years ago, he had never heard either of the ice 
age or of totemism ! He appeared to think that the 
terms might be the ingenious discoveries of M. 
Reinach himself. Now, Mommsen is properly ranked 
among the most extraordinary historians of modern 
times. The mass of his work and its quality are 
famiHar to us all. Nevertheless, his ignorance of 
two of the commonplaces of prehistoric archaeology 
and anthropology prevented him from seeing the 
Roman civilization in its proper perspective and from 
thoroughly grasping its religious, and perhaps even 
the legal, phenomena. Man, as Henry Adams has so 
neatly expressed it, is now viewed as a ''function" of 
the ice age during a very long period. As for totem- 
ism, it has been called upon to explain such different 
phenomena as the frescoes in the dark caves of the 
Magdalenien period, the abhorrence of the Jew for 
pork, and the esteem of a baseball team for its mas- 
cot. Many beliefs and practices of the Christian 
church are now seen to go back by direct or devious 
ways to totemism, animism, and the mana. 

The historical student who realizes this will hasten 
to acquaint himself, if he has not already done so, with 
some of the most suggestive works in this field of 
anthropology and comparative religion. He will be 
a very dull person indeed if he does not find his con- 



92 THE NEW HISTORY 

captions of the past fundamentally changing as he 
reads, let us say, the extracts which Professor Thomas 
has so conveniently brought together in his Source 
Book for Social Origins^ or the fascinating Folkways, 
of the late Professor Sumner; or Solomon Reinach's 
Orpheus, Conybeare's Myth, Magic, and Morals, or De 
Morgan's Les premieres civilisations, — to mention only 
the more obvious examples of this class of literature. 

Ill 

So it has come about that the older notions of our 
relations to the so-called ''ancients," of religion in gen- 
eral and Christianity in particular, and of ''race," are 
being gravely modified by the investigations of those 
who are not commonly classed as historians. These 
latter have demonstrated the superficial character of 
the older historians' reasoning and pointed the way 
to new and truer interpretations of past events and 
conditions. Other terms which historians have used 
without any adequate understanding of them are 
"progress" and "decline," "human nature," "histori- 
cal continuity," and "civilization." Even a slight 
tincture of anthropology, reenforced by the elements 
of the newer allied branches of social and animal 
psychology, will do much to deepen and rectify the 
sense in which we use these terms. ,. 

Social psychology, as yet in an inchoate condition, 
is based on the conviction that we owe our own ego 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 93 

to our association with others ; it is a social product. 
Without others we should never be ourselves. As 
Professor George H. Mead expresses it: ''Whatever 
may be the metaphysical impossibilities or possi- 
bilities of solipsism, psychologically it is non-existent. 
There must be other selves if one's own is to exist. 
Psychological analysis, retrospection, and the study 
of children and primitive people give no inkhng of 
situations in which self could have existed in conscious- 
ness except as the counterpart of other selves." 

It may at first sight seem a far cry from the origin 
of the ego and its dependence on the socius to such his- 
torical questions as the dates of Sargon's reign, the 
meaning of the Renaissance, or Napoleon's views of 
the feasibility of invading England. There are, how- 
ever, plenty of matters of still more vital importance 
on which the judgments of historical students are 
likely to be gravely affected by some acquaintance 
with the recent discussions in regard to the laws of 
imitation^ with which Tarde's name is especially asso- 
ciated, and with the relation of our reason to the more 
primitive instincts which we inherit from our animal 
ancestors. Indeed, the great and fundamental ques- 
tion of how mankind learns and disseminates his dis- 
coveries and misapprehensions — in short, the whole 
rationale of human civilization as distinguished from 
the Hfe of the anthropoids — will never be understood 
without social psychology; and social psychology 
will never be understood without animal psychology ; 



94 THE NEW HISTORY 

these studies alone can serve to explain the real nature 
of progress and retrogression — matters to which no 
historical student can afford to remain indifferent. 
There is obviously no possibility of explaining ade- 
quately in a brief essay this rather perturbing proposi- 
tion, but its importance seems to me so great that I am 
going to venture to present the situation very briefly. 
In the first place, is it not clear that we still permit 
ourselves, as is not at all unnatural, to be victimized 
by the old anthropocentric conception of things? 
This has been so long accepted by the western world 
that in spite of the discoveries of the past sixty years 
we find many unrevised notions from the past still lurk- 
ing in the corners of our judgment. We are constantly 
forgetting, I fear, that man was not created, male and 
female, in a day, as Mark Hopkins and those of his 
generation commonly believed. We did not begin our 
human existence with pure and holy aspirations, a 
well-developed language, and a knowledge of agricul- 
ture, but are descended from a long line of brute an- 
cestors, unable either to talk or to cultivate the soil. 
All animals that now live or ever have lived on the 
earth, including man, ^'are mayhap united together 
by blood relationship of varying nearness or remote- 
ness." Every one of us has a pedigree stretching back 
not merely a couple of hundred generations, but 
through all geologic time since Hfe first commenced on 
the globe. Man's bodily resemblance to the anthro- 
poid apes has long been a subject of comment. Ennius 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 95 

gave expression over two thousand years ago to the 
disconcerting discovery : — 

Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis ? 

With the modern development of zoology and com- 
parative anatomy more intimate structural similarities 
were brought to light; Darwin sketched a portrait 
of the turpissima bestia, our hairy ancestor, with his 
tail, prehensile foot, and great canine teeth. This 
hypothesis has since been substantiated by the dis- 
covery of numerous vestigial muscles and organs, ata- 
vistic reversions, and pathological conditions which 
can be readily explained only on evolutionary grounds. 
But if our bodies and their functions so closely re- 
semble those of our nearest relatives among the ani- 
mals, what shall we say of our minds? Are these 
altogether different from the animal minds from which 
they have gradually developed, or do they perpetuate, 
like our bodies, all the old that is still available and 
perhaps not a few traits that now merely hamper us 
or tend to beget serious disorders? May not the 
minds of our remote ancestors, who had not yet learned 
to talk, still serve us not only in infancy and when senile 
dementia overtakes us, but may they not be our nor- 
mal guides in the simpler exigencies of Hfe ? I think 
that it is not hazardous to affirm that the perpetuation 
in man of psychological processes to be observed in the 
other primates would be acknowledged by all students 
of animal psychology. If this be true, may we not look 



96 THE NEW HISTORY 

to the study of animal psychology, as it develops, for 
information which will enable us to discover and ap- 
preciate for the first time what really goes to make 
up a human being as distinguished from his humbler 
relatives ? 

Comparative, or animal, psychology has only re- 
cently found a place in some of our universities. 
Professor E. L. Thorndike was perhaps the first, some 
twelve years ago, to attempt to put the subject on a 
modem experimental basis. Since then much has been 
done, especially in the United States. We can hardly 
hope to know very clearly what an ape is thinking 
about as he looks out from under his wrinkled brow. 
"Les animaux ne nous font pas des confidences," 
as Reinach has truly observed. But scientific ob- 
servation and experimentation are throwing light on 
the educability of apes and other animals and on the 
ways in which they appear to learn. They have al- 
ready proved that the chimpanzee can readily master 
a vast number of acts over and above anything that 
his ancestors have ever known in the jungle. He is 
marvelously teachable. He appears to learn by ^^ trial 
and error" and by a process which we may term 
''trick psychology," stimulated by rewards and pun- 
ishments. The exact nature and role of ''imitation" 
is not yet very clear, but I think that no one can 
doubt its importance. Now the obvious question 
forces itself on us, Do we not all learn, for the most 
part, much as the chimpanzee learns, by trial and 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 97 

error and by mastering tricks, stimulated by rewards 
and punishments, and by "imitation" ? The answer 
will be, I am convinced, that almost all our education 
is based on modified simian principles. To a believer 
in the continuity of history that should be a cheering 
discovery, humiliating as it is in other respects. 

I am aware that to most students of history the 
results of comparative psychology will seem at first 
sight too remote to have any assignable bearing on the 
problems that face them. This impression is, however, 
erroneous, at least where questions of the character 
and transmission of culture are involved. We can- 
not understand the nature of culture, as distinguished 
from our merely animal heritage, without some notion 
of animal psychology. It seems probable that the 
historical student will deal far more inteUigently with 
the changes of thought, the development of institu- 
tions, the progress of invention, and almost all reli- 
gious phenomena when he learns to distinguish 
between the higher and rarer manifestations of pecul- 
iarly human psychology and the current and funda- 
mental simian mental modes upon which we still 
rely so constantly with the assurance of ancestral 
habit. 

I will give but a single illustration from this field of 
speculation. Gabriel Tarde has emphasized the fact 
that every minutest element in civilization, every 
atom of culture that we have, over and above our 
animal outfit, must either be handed on from one 



98 THE NEW HISTORY 

generation to the next, or else be rediscovered, or 
lost. Now it should be part of the historian's busi- 
ness, and no unimportant part, to follow out the 
actual historical workings of this rule. Civilization 
is not innate, but transmitted by ^'imitation" in the 
large sense of the word. A word, or a particular 
form of tool, or a book, will die out as surely as an 
organism unless it is propagated and regenerated. 
Let us apply this law in a single case. How little 
addition to the general disorder and to the chronic 
discouragements of learning is necessary to account 
for the fatal disappearance of Greek books in the 
West after the dissolution of the Roman Empire ! 
Suppose only half as many people in Gaul read 
Greek in the time of Gregory of Tours as had known it 
in Constantine's time. How greatly would this in- 
crease the chances of the complete disappearance of 
Xenophon's Cyropcedia or Euripides's Elektra ? 

In concluding these reflections I am painfully con- 
scious that they may suggest serious dangers to some 
thoughtful readers. The historical student may be 
ready to grant that he has neglected the influence that 
discoveries in other fields should have on his own con- 
clusions; but how, he will ask, is he to find time to 
acquaint himself with all the branches of anthropol- 
ogy, of sociology, political economy, comparative 
rehgion, social psychology, animal psychology, physi- 
cal geography, climatology, and the rest ? It is hard 
for him even to keep up with the new names, and he 



THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 99 

has a not unnatural distrust of those who tender him 
easy explanations for things that they still know so 
little about. Some of the more exuberant represen- 
tatives of the newer social sciences remind the his- 
torian disagreeably of the now nearly extinct tribe of 
philosophers of history, who flattered themselves that 
their penetrating intellects had been able to discover 
the wherefore of man's past without the trouble of 
learning much about it. 

But the historical student who classes the modem 
social sciences with the old and discredited philosophy 
of history is making a serious mistake. The philos- 
ophers of history sought to justify man's past in order 
to satisfy some sentimental craving, and their ex- 
planations were, in the last analysis, usually begotten 
of some theological or national prejudice. The con- 
temporaneous student of society, on the contrary, 
offers very real and valuable, if obviously partial, ex- 
planations of the past. It is true that he sometimes 
forgets what Hume calls the " vast variety which 
nature has affected in her operations," and tries to 
explain more than his favorite cause will account for, 
but this ought not to blind us to his usefulness. 

It is obvious that, like the geologist, the physiolo- 
gist, and the biologist, the historian is forced to make 
use of pertinent information furnished by workers in 
other fields, even if he has no time to master more than 
the elements of the sciences most nearly alHed to his 
own. He may use anthropological and psychological 



100 THE NEW HISTORY 

discoveries and information without becoming either 
an anthropologist or a psychologist. These discov- 
eries and this information will inevitably suggest new 
points of view and new interpretations to the his- 
torian, and will help to rectify the old misapprehensions 
and dispel the innumerable ancient illusions which 
still permeate our historical treatises. Above all, let 
the historical student become unreservedly historical- 
minded, avail himself of the genetic explanation of 
human experience, and free himself from the suspi- 
cion that, in spite of his name and assumptions, he 
is as yet the least historical, in his attitude and 
methods, of all those who to-day are so eagerly 
attempting to explain mankind. 

It may well be that speculation in the newer fields 
has often far outrun the data accumulated, and the 
historical student has not infrequently been offered 
explanations of the past which he has done well to 
reject. The sociologist, anthropologist, and economist 
have doubtless often thought too fast and too reck- 
lessly, and this has engendered an excessive reserve 
in the historian, who has sometimes flattered himself 
on not thinking at all. But there is, in the long run, 
more risk in thinking too little than too much, and the 
kind of thought suggested by the new allies of his- 
tory should serve, if judiciously practiced, greatly to 
strengthen and deepen the whole range of historical 
study and render its results far more valuable than 
they have hitherto been. 



I03 



SOME REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL 
HISTORY 



Lord Bacon, in his Advancement oj Learning, says : 
''No man hath propounded to himself the general 
state of learning to be described and represented 
from age to age, as many have done the works of 
nature and the State civil and ecclesiastical ; without 
which the history of the world seemeth to me to be as 
the statue of Polyphemus with his eye out ; that part 
being wanting which doth most show the spirit and 
life of the person. And yet I am not ignorant that in 
divers particular sciences, as of the jurisconsults, the 
mathematicians, the rhetoricians, the philosophers, 
there are set down some small memorials of the schools, 
authors, and books ; and so likewise some barren rela- 
tions touching the invention of arts or usages. But a 
just story of learning, containing the antiquities and 
originals of knowledges and their sects ; their inven- 
tions, their traditions ; their diverse administrations 
and managings ; their flourishings, their oppositions, 
decays, depressions, oblivions, removes ; with the 
causes and occasions of them, and all other events 
concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world ; 
I may truly affirm to be wanting." 

lOI 



T102 THE NEW HISTORY 

Three centuries have passed since Bacon wrote 
these lines, but the deficiency which he points out has 
not yet been remedied. We have as yet no ''just 
story of learning." It is true that we have histories 
of certain kinds of thought, especially of philosophy and 
theology, but these confine themselves in the main to 
the systems of distinguished thinkers, — the Platos, 
Aristotles, Kants, and Kegels, the Pauls, Augustines, 
Aquinases, Luthers, and Jonathan Edwardses, — 
rather than to the conceptions that were current among 
their thoughtful contemporaries. Only the simpler 
and easier portions of a philosophic system can be 
thoroughly digested by intelligent laymen so as to 
influence the history of opinion. When we speak of 
Angus tinianism, HegeHanism, or Marxism, we do not 
mean the complete philosophic systems of these writers, 
but such particularly impressive discoveries, few in 
number, as stand out in relief against the mass of 
subtleties with which only the expert will be tempted 
to reckon. A member of the intellectual class to-day, 
looking back and asking himself whence come those 
ideas which he himself accepts and which he sees ac- 
cepted by others about him, will for the most part look 
in vain in histories of philosophy for answers to his 
questions. Bacon's reproach is still merited, for no 
one has as yet, so far as I know, ever clearly conceived 
of a general history of the chief opinions of the intellec- 
tual class. 

Yet what more vital has the past to teach us than '; 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 103 

the manner in which our convictions on large ques- y i 
tions have arisen, developed and changed? We do ' 
not, assuredly, owe most of them to painful personal 
excogitation, but inherit them, along with the in- 
stitutions and social habits of the land in which we 
live. The content of a well-stocked mind is the 
product of tens of thousands of years of accumu- 
lation. Many widespread notions could by no possi- 
bility have originated in modern times, but have arisen 
in conditions quite alien to those of the present. We 
have too often, in consequence, an outworn intellec- 
tual equipment for new and unheard-of tasks. Only a 
study of the vicissitudes of human opinion can make us 
fully aware of this and enable us to readjust our views 
so as to adapt them to our present environment. If 
it be true, as was maintained in an earher essay, that 
opinion tends, in the dynamic age in which we Hve, 
to lag far behind our changing environment, how can j 
we better discover the anachronisms in our views and 
in our attitude toward the world than by studying . 
their origin ? Is not Bacon right in accusing the his- 
torian of presenting us mth an image of the past with- 
out its great cyclopean eye, which alone reveals its 
spirit and life? 

The eager interest of the public in this neglected 
field is shown by the long-continued popularity of Dr. 
Draper's Intellectual Developme^it. This work has for 
years enjoyed a reputation far exceeding its merits. 
From a modern standpoint the book is deficient in 



I04 THE NEW HISTORY 

almost every respect, except its effective style and the 
assurance of its author. Dr. Draper has not seen fit 
at any point to give the reader the slightest clue to the 
sources of his information, but it is clear to the critical 
reader that his impressions were derived from such mis- 
cellaneous works as were available in the early sixties, 
and that his conclusions do not at any point rest upon 
a conscientious study of first-hand material. His 
object, he frankly tells us, was to prove two laws, 
which no one nowadays would believe to be laws at 
all.i 

About the same time that Draper's work appeared, 
Lecky published his Rise and Influence of Rationalism 
in Europe. This is on a very different plane from 
Draper's volumes. It is the result of careful investi- 
gation, and exhibits the characteristic prudence and 
intellectual poise of the writer. Unhappily, however, 
it confines itself in the main to the last three centuries 
of European development, with only such background 
as seemed essential to make the tale clear. 

A third work which has attracted much attention 
is Andrew D. White's Warfare of Science and Theology. 
This is written with a polemical eagerness begotten 
perhaps of Ex-President White's own effective par- 
ticipation in the battle. He was aided in his work by 
scholars who supplied him with a large amount of evi- 
dence, which he used with the utmost effect in routing 
the theologians; but the avowed object of the book 
1 See above, p. 64, note. 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 105 

IS to reveal the absurdities of patristic and medieval 
tradition rather than to present impartially the ele- 
ments of intellectual history. 

Leslie Stephen, in his English Thought in the Eight- 
eenth Century, has done much to supplement the his- 
tories of eighteenth-century philosophy and literature. 
A. W. Benn, in his English Rationalism in the Nineteenth 
Century, has traced the growing discontent with that 
class of opinions which had received a religious sanc- 
tion. Merz's History of European Thought in the Nine- 
teenth Century is perhaps the most scholarly and signal 
contribution to a general history of the intellectual class 
that has yet appeared. Some of his chapters furnish 
excellent illustrations of the profitable character of 
this hne of historical investigation. More recently 
Henry Osborn Taylor has given us a masterly picture of 
The Mediceval Mind, which is at once sympathetic and 
critical, and is based upon an assiduous intercourse with 
the sources. All of these, whatever their merits, are, 
however, confined to particular periods, if we except 
Draper's now obsolete volumes, and in none of them 
would the reader find a general summary of the chief 
phases through which the European intellect has passed. 

Any effort to ''propound to one's self the general 
state of learning to be described from age to age " might 
seem destined to failure in view of the intricate prob- 
lems offered by each particular period. Nevertheless 
it would not be impossible, could one emancipate him- 
self from the traditional presentation of the past, to 



I06 THE NEW HISTORY 

present in an orderly way the development of the chief 
concomitants of our own particular intellectual heri- 
tage, always keeping before one the attitude of mind 
and range of knowledge of the intellectual class at 
large, rather than that of special investigators and 
scholars : its convictions on certain large -questions, 
its methods of reasoning, its powers of criticism, its 
authorities, the sources of information that it has 
from time to time cherished, whether human or divine, 
the range of its knowledge, and the depth of its igno- 
rance, as judged by what had gone before and what 
came after. Special emphasis should naturally be laid 
throughout on the modes of attaining and transmitting 
knowledge — or what was mistaken for such — and its 
application to the welfare and improvement of man's 
estate in this world or the next. 

II 

One who attempted to trace the general history of 
thought to-day would have to take into consideration 
certain vital discoveries which could not have influ- 
enced Lecky and Draper. We are now tolerably well 
assured that could the human mind be followed back, 
it would be found to merge into the animal mind, and 
that consequently the recently developing study of ani- 
mal or comparative psychology is likely to cast a great 
deal of hght upon certain modes of thought. I do 
not mean by this that there is any reason to suppose 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 107 

that the animals exercise reason in the narrower sense 
of that term, but that there is, at certain points, a 
striking parallelism between the methods of learning 
in the higher animals and in ourselves. In any case a 
study of animal psychology brings out more clearly 
than can otherwise be done the essential pecuHarities 
of human psychology. Certain of the higher animals, 
especially the apes, are remarkably educable and 
show the possibiKties of learning, independently of 
reason. This capacity for learning without the use of 
reason we not only share with the animals, but we have 
it in a far greater degree than they. The exact nature 
of human culture and its method of transmission, as 
well as of human reason as over against simian 
mental processes, can only be made apparent by this 
new science of animal psychology, which is now being 
assiduously cultivated, especially in the United States. 
The equally new branch of social psychology, as 
was pointed out in the previous essay, ought in 
time to make plainer the nature and extent of our 
dependence on our fellow-men. In short, we not 
only retain our animal mind, but, in addition, those 
more primitive forms of reasoning, which anthropolog- 
ical research is discovering to be common to all so- 
called primitive peoples. Just as our animal mind 
stands us in good stead in certain crises, so the more 
primitive forms of reasoning are always present when 
they are not submerged by accumulations of knowl- 
edge and artificially developed criticism. 



Io8 THE NEW HISTORY 

Of the gradual clarification of man's psychology 
through hundreds of thousands of years, we can only 
judge from the vestiges we have of human handiwork 
supplemented by the inferences that may be made 
from the reasoning of the savage and the progressive 
unfolding of the infant's mind. Previous to the ap- 
pearance of written records, we must judge of what 
man knew, by the scanty vestiges of what he did; in 
no other way can we discover the foundations of the 
first historic culture of which we have any tolerable 
knowledge, that of the Egyptians, dating back five or 
six thousand years. 

The Egyptians do not appear to have led an intel- 
lectual Hfe in the later Greek sense of the term. They 
elaborated an intricate theory of existence after death ; 
they made many industrial discoveries, and observed 
the heavens with such care as was necessary in order 
best to utilize the rise and fall of the river upon which 
they were dependent for subsistence. Western Europe 
doubtless owed to the Egyptians more than can ever 
be determined. It is, however, from the Babylonians 
and Assyrians that we get our divisions of time, the 
hours, minutes, and seconds, and the plan of dividing 
the circle into 360 parts. The Greeks, and, later, 
western Europe, derived their astrological enthusiasm 
from these older civilizations. 

Intellectual Hfe in the narrower sense of the term ap- 
pears, as far as we can trace it, to have found its first 
home among the Ionian Greeks, and especially in the 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 109 

city of Miletus, some six or seven hundred years before 
Christ. But underlying the speculations of Thales, 
Anaximander, and other members of this group is the 
vast substructure which has been touched upon above. 
When the Ionian philosophers asked what was the 
principle of all things, they asked a question which is 
highly sophisticated and artificial and which repre- 
sents a type of scientific abstraction which can only 
come with great maturity of thought. There has been, 
so to speak, a desperate struggle ever since the time 
of Thales to maintain this scientific ambition, which 
has constantly been threatened with destruction by 
older and more primitive types of thought, that may i 
be classified as practical, mystical, and romantic. -i 

The Ionian philosophers and those of Eha appear 
to have exercised their minds on highly metaphysical 
questions, such as '' the one and the many," '' being and 
not being," and the paradoxes which such conceptions 
suggested. Suddenly, almost without warning, we 
find the Sophists of Athens presenting a fullness and 
I maturity of intellectual life which in many respects 
can scarcely be paralleled to-day. Unhappily their 
works are for the most part lost, and it may well have 
been that much of their speculation was — like that 
of Socrates — not written out, but was confined to 
conversation and oral disputation. Our impressions 
of what they talked about are derived chiefly from a 
hostile Plato and from citations in Aristotle. 

So abounding is the intellectual vitahty of these two 



no THE NEW HISTORY 

writers, so inexhaustible the range of their speculations, 
so profound their philosophical penetration, that one 
who dedicates himself to the study of their works is 
apt to feel that all intellectual history since their day 
is only the record of a degeneration. It would become 
necessary, therefore, in tracing the intellectual history 
of Europe, to ask one's self not so much what Plato and 
Aristotle themselves may have beHeved or discovered, 
as what particular phases of their thought were gener- 
ally current among the intellectual class in their 
own or in later times. It was their fate to become, 
above all other individual thinkers, the teachers of the 
Europe from which we derive our intellectual heritage. 
It must be remembered that, on the one hand, Cicero 
and the new Academy traced its amiable skepticism 
back to Plato, and that, on the other hand, Plotinus 
and the Neoplatonists believed that they derived 
their super-rational and ecstatic tenets from the same 
source. As for Aristotle, while he fills the modern 
critic, whether his interests be in letters, philosophy, 
science, or poHtics, with astonishment and admiration, 
it should not be forgotten that he was the idol of the 
thirteenth-century scholastics, who made his vicious 
theory of essences and final causes and his infertile 
syllogistic reasoning the basis of their speculation. 

The scholars of the Hellenistic period at Alexandria 
and elsewhere appear in certain fields to have carried 
on the Hellenic traditions in a profitable way, but their 
additions to knowledge were more than counterbalanced 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY m 

by a vast literature of comment, exegesis, and literary 
criticism which made little appeal to thoughtful men 
in the Roman period. The works of the Alexandrian 
school were mainly permitted to perish, with the no- 
table exception of EucHd and the geographical, astro- 
nomical, and astrological compilations of Ptolemy, 
which were taken up by the Arab scholars and reap- 
peared in the thirteenth century in western Europe. 

The melancholy decline of Hellenism in the later 
Roman Empire was accompanied by the development 
of new types of intellectual enthusiasm based upon 
entirely different presuppositions in regard to man's 
origin and chief business in Hf e. One of the great modern 
historical discoveries is that what we term ''medieval " 
thought was to all intents and purposes completely 
elaborated in the later Roman Empire, before the Ger- 
mans disrupted the western portions of the vast com- 
monwealth organized by Augustus. An emotional 
revolution had begun as early as Plutarch and had 
gradually served to denature the traditions of the in- 
tellectual life as they had come down from Athens. 
Reason became an object of suspicion; its impotence 
seemed to have been clearly proved ; the intellectual 
class sought solace not so much in the restraints of 
Stoicism as in the abandon of Neoplatonism, and the 
vagaries of theurgy and of oriental mysticism. The 
clarity and moderation which we associate with Hellen- 
ism gave place to the deprecation of reason and a cor- 
responding confidence in the supernatural. Plotinus 



112 THE NEW HISTORY 

maintained that only the meaner things of life come 
within the scope of reason ; that the highest truth is 
supernatural; that it is through intuition rather than 
reason that we may hope to approach our highest 
aspirations. 

Harnack has well said that Neoplatonism, however 
lofty and inspiring in some of its aspects, impKed 
nothing less than intellectual bankruptcy. "The con- 
tempt for reason and science (for these are contemned 
when relegated to a second place) finally leads to 
barbarism, because it results in crass superstition, and 
is exposed to all manner of imposture. And, as a 
matter of fact, barbarism succeeded the flourishing 
period of Neoplatonism. . . . The masses grew up 
in superstition, and the Christian Church, which en- 
tered on the inheritance of Neoplatonism, was com- 
pelled to reckon with this and come to terms with it. 
Just when the bankruptcy of the ancient civilization 
and its lapse into barbarism could not have failed to 
reveal themselves, a kindly destiny placed on the stage 
of European history certain barbarian nations, for 
whom the work of a thousand years had as yet no 
existence. Thus the fact is obscured, though it does 
not escape the eye of one who looks below the 
surface, that the ancient world must necessarily have 
degenerated into barbarism of its own accord, because 
of its renunciation of this world. There was no longer 
any desire either to enjoy it, to master it, or to know 
it as it really is. A new world had been disclosed for 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 113 

which everything in this world was to be given up, and 
men were ready to sacrifice insight and understanding, 
in order to possess that other world with certainty. 
In the light which radiated from the world to come, 
that which in this world appeared absurd became 
wisdom, and wisdom became folly." ^ 

It was just at this period that historical Christianity 
received its formulation in the works of the church 
fathers. It is suggestive that the greatest of these, 
Augustine, had been attracted both by the teachings 
of the Persian, Manes, and by the seductions of Neo- 
platonism. The '' Christian Epic," as Santayana has 
happily termed it, formed the basis for a new intellec- 
tual life which developed in an emotional milieu as 
different as possible from that of Athens in the fifth 
century before Christ. The new thought was able 
to take up certain ideal and mystic elements which 
may clearly be perceived in Plato, but it had no taste 
for the promising contributions to an exact knowledge 
of the world which had been made by Democritus and 
the Epicureans, who accepted his mechanistic view of 
the universe, by Aristotle in his recorded observations, 
and by those scientists of the Alexandrian period, such 
as Aristarchus, Hipparchus, and Archimedes, who 
might, had their spirit and methods prevailed, have 
earHer developed that natural science which is the boast 
of our own day. The intellectual life as it had been 
lived in all its freshness by the contemporaries of 

1 History of Dogma, Vol. I, pp. 3,2,7~2,2)^' 

I 



114 THE NEW HISTORY 

Socrates was bound to result eventually in disappoint- 
ment. It was too exclusively intellectual ; it sought 
truth in purely intellectual operations and clarification. 
It rarely touched concretely upon the social and eco- 
nomic problems which oppress us to-day, and it failed 
to recognize the significance of painstaking scientific 
research or to perceive the possibility of applying the 
resulting knowledge of the natural world, organic and 
"inorganic, to practical ends. 

In this respect the scholastic revival of the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries is characteristically Hellenic 
in spirit. It is true that by that time authority was 
assigned an overwhelming importance, whereas the 
Athenians, previous to Aristotle's time, had been al- 
most free from this embarrassment. Thomas Aquinas 
operated with different materials from Plato and gave 
his thought a different form, but the general intellec- 
tual affinity between the two men is apparent enough. 

By the end of the twelfth century the first univer- 
sities were established. Theology became a subject 
of systematic instruction based upon the convenient 
outline of patristic opinion furnished by Peter Lom- 
bard's Sentences. With the reintroduction of Aris- 
totle's works in a defective Latin translation, the older 
study of the Seven Liberal Arts in the meager epitomes 
which had come down from earlier centuries was re- 
placed by lectures on all the chief works of the most 
masterly exponent of Greek thought. If we exclude 
law and medicine, the two great preoccupations of 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 115 

the intellectual class in west^xn Europe in the thir- 
teenth century were, accordingly, the highly elaborated 
Christian theology, in all its subtle ramifications, on 
the one hand, and, on the other, Aristotle's logical 
treatises, his Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, Be Anima, 
and the minor works on natural phenomena, as they 
were understood by the ecclesiastical commentators of 
the time. With their own observations the schoolmen 
combined those of the Arabic philosophers, who had 
known and studied Aristotle, above all of Averroes. 
The Arabs were, however, rather more remote from 
the real Aristotle than Albertus Magnus and Thomas 
Aquinas, for their Arabic translations had passed 
through Syriac on the way from the Greek. So, as 
Renan humorously says of Averroes' commentary, 
the western universities prayerfully studied for cen- 
turies a Latin translation, of a Hebrew translation, 
of an Arabic commentator on an Arabic translation, 
of a Syriac translation of a Greek philosopher. Even 
supposing that the Latin translations of Aristotle were 
as perfect as translations can be, there was little chance 
that the thirteenth-century thinker could possibly 
transcend all the obstacles that lay in the way of 
understanding a Greek philosopher of the fourth 
century before Christ. The revival of Aristotle, 
instead of rectifying the deficient perspective of the 
earlier Middle Ages and supplying knowledge which 
would serve as a starting-point for further progress, 
only added one more obstacle to a fundamental 



Il6 THE NEW HISTORY 

readjustment of thought. It enhanced rather than 
weakened the respect for authority, discouraged rather 
than promoted the search for fresh truth. 

During the fifteenth century Greek was once more 
revived in Italy. The language had nearly died 
out in the West about the year 500, and Boethius had 
made an unsuccessful attempt to perpetuate a knowl- 
edge of the chief Greek writers by translating them into 
Latin, since obviously all knowledge of Greek works 
was bound to vanish so soon as the knowledge of the 
language formerly possessed by educated Romans 
disappeared. For several centuries before Chryso- 
lorus began to teach Greek to a group of eager disciples 
in Florence in 1396, we find few allusions to Greek 
works. While the names of Homer and Plato were 
not forgotten, the scholars of the twelfth century rarely 
knew of the existence of ^schylus or Sophocles, of 
Herodotus or Thucydides. The Humanists of the 
fifteenth century devoted themselves to rediscovering 
every vestige of Greek literature that could be found, 
as well as such Latin writers as Tacitus and Lucretius, 
who had been forgotten. They translated the Greek 
books into Latin, and thus rendered current in intellec- 
tual circles those works that still remain to us from 
classical antiquity. 

It is, however, a grave mistake to assume that this 
renewed interest in the Greek and Roman authors be- 
tokened a revival of Hellenism, as has commonly been 
supposed. The libraries described by Vespasiano, a 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 117 

Florentine bookseller of the fifteenth century, indi- 
cate the least possible discrimination on the part of 
his patrons. Ficino, the translator of Plato, was an 
enthusiastic Neoplatonist, and to Pico della Mirandola 
the Jewish Cabbala seemed to promise infinite enlight- 
enment. In short, Plato was as incapable in the fif- 
teenth century of producing an intellectual revolution 
as Aristotle had been in the thirteenth. With the 
exception of Valla, whose critical powers were perhaps 
sHghtly stimulated by acquaintance with the classics, 
it must be confessed that there was Httle in the so- 
called '^New Learning" to generate any thing approach- 
ing an era of criticism. It is difiicult, to be sure, to 
imagine a MacchiavelH or an Erasmus in the thirteenth 
century, but it is Hkewise difficult to determine the 
numerous and subtle changes which made them pos- 
sible at the opening of the sixteenth; and it is reckless 
to assume that the Humanists were chiefly responsible 
for these changes. 

The defection of the Protestants from the Roman 
Catholic Church is not connected with any decisive in- 
tellectual revision. Such ardent emphasis has been 
constantly placed upon the differences between Protes- 
tantism and CathoHcism by representatives of both 
parties that the close intellectual resemblance of the 
two systems, indeed their identity in nine parts out of 
ten, has tended to escape us. The early Protestants, of 
course, accepted, as did the CathoHcs, the whole patris- 
tic outlook on the world ; their historical perspective 



Il8 THE NEW HISTORY 

was similar, their notions of the origin of man, of the 
Bible, with its types, prophecies, and miracles, of 
heaven and hell, of demons and angels, are all identical. 
To the early Protestants, as to Cathohcs, he who would 
be saved must accept the doctrine of the triune God 
and must be ever on his guard against the whisperings 
of reason and the innovations suggested by scientific 
advance. Luther and Melanchthon denounced Co- 
pernicus in the name of the Bible. Melanchthon re- 
edited, with enthusiastic approval, Ptolemy's astrology. 
Luther made repeated and bitter attacks upon reason ; 
in whose eyes he freely confessed the presuppositions 
of Christianity to be absurd. Calvin gloried in man's 
initial and inherent moral impotency; and the doc- 
trine of predestination seemed calculated to paralyze 
all human effort. 

The Protestants did not know any more about nature 
than their Catholic enemies ; they were just as com- 
pletely victimized by the demonology of Witchcraft. 
The Protestant Revolt was not begotten of added 
scientific knowledge, nor did it owe its success to any 
considerable confidence in criticism. As Gibbon 
pointed out, the loss of one conspicuous mystery — 
that of transubstantiation — "was amply compensated 
by the stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, 
faith, grace, and predestination" which the Protestants 
strained from the epistles of St. Paul. Early Protes- 
tantism is, from an intellectual standpoint, essentially 
a phase of medieval religious history. 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 123 

ceded even by the most intrepid Hellenic enthusiasts 
that, as we compare our own with earUer periods, 
there can be no doubt that there is a large element of 
novelty in the present situation. Nobody questions 
that in such matter as locomotives, sewing machines, 
steam threshers, telephones, and arc hghts our age 
is one unparalleled in the past. There is, however, 
still a very common feeling, especially among men of 
the highest degree of literary and artistic cultivation, 
that our advance beyond the Greeks in art and litera- 
ture is somewhat questionable, and with this goes the 
suspicion that the Greeks exhibited practically all 
the varieties of intellectual activity which we now 
witness, that here and there they forecast almost all 
of our fundamental scientific discoveries, and that 
their ideals of the intellectual life w^ere equal, if not 
superior, to anything to which man has since attained. 
It seems to the writer that this suspicion is the re- 
sult of a failure to realize certain fundamental novelties 
which underKe the characteristic thought of our own 
time. At least five such novelties appear to be rather 
easily distinguishable. Two of them have already been 
mentioned : (i) Experimental science, which engages 
in a minute observation of natural phenomena aided 
by instruments adapted to the purpose, and verified 
by experimentation, is essentially a product of modern 
times. The Greeks had no telescopes, nor microscopes, 
nor thermometers, nor spectroscopes. Their knowl- 
edge was at best the result of what would seem to us 



124 THE NEW HISTORY 

crude and haphazard observation which tended to i 
take the form of accepted authority. Why, the Scho- 
lastics would have asked, is it necessary to see whether 
a heavy body falls more rapidly than a light one, since 
Aristotle has told us that it does ? Then in the second 
place, (2) our modern idea of progress through the con- 
tinual discovery of new knowledge and the improve- 
ment of man's condition is one that does not appear 
clearly among the Greeks and Romans. 

Into the thought of the nineteenth century, three 
additional elements entered: — 

(3) In some inexplicable way there has come a 
respect for, and appreciation of, the common man, a 
solicitude for his welfare, and a willingness to permit 
him to share in the control of public affairs. These 
together constitute what may be called the democratic 
spirit. So long as slavery or serfdom existed, as they 
did down until recent times, the democratic spirit was 
impossible. It is this appreciation of the common 
man which is reflected in our development of social 
sciences, undreamed of by the Greeks, and in the 
socializing of older subjects, such as psychology and 
ethics. Political economy was born in the eighteenth 
century; in the nineteenth anthropology developed 
on a large scale, together with the comparative study 
of religions, sociology, and social psychology. 

(4) The tendency to occupy this social point of view 
has been greatly increased by another new factor, the 
Industrial Revolution, with all its attendant circum- 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 125 

stances. By the Industrial Revolution is, of course, 
meant the fundamental change in our methods of 
economic production and organization due to the de- 
velopment of machinery and the factory system. At 
first sight these matters would seem remote from the 
life of the intellect. Why should our general view of 
the world be materially affected by new ways of spin- 
ning and weaving and more efficient methods of 
manufacturing boots and shoes ? Simply because it 
suggests hitherto unsuspected possibilities of social re- 
adjustment and the promotion of human happiness, — 
two of the most engaging subjects of modern specu- 
lation. As Robert Owen pointed out, our increased 
capacity of production through machinery is equiva- 
lent to vastly increasing the number of workers in the 
world without any increase of the number of persons 
to be cared for. If, in a manufacturing town of 
twenty thousand inhabitants, modern machinery 
permits an output which formerly would have re- 
quired two hundred thousand workers, each individual 
will have, on the average, nine helpers in providing 
the necessities and material amenities of life. 
Hitherto the Industrial Revolution has, from the 
standpoint of the common man, been distinctly 
disappointing in its results. For a variety of reasons, 
which it is impossible to enumerate here, the work 
done by his helpers appears to profit him very little. 
Nevertheless, the intellect has perhaps never had a 
more exhilarating problem set before it than the pos- 



126 THE NEW HISTORY 

sibilities of readjustment implied in the economic 
revolution. 

We owe, moreover, to the Industrial Revolution the 
development of our cities, and city life has always been 
closely associated with intellectual changes, so that we 
are justified in assuming that the vast extension of 
our urban interests must ultimately deeply affect our 
speculations. Associated with these same economic 
changes is the development of world-commerce and of 
incredibly efficient means of communication, which 
have brought mankind together throughout the whole 
earth in a spirit of competition, emulation, and co- 
operation. It will not be many years before every one 
on the face of the globe can read and write and be in 
a position through our means of intercommunication 
to follow the course of events in every portion of the 
earth. This astonishing condition of affairs suggests 
boundless possibiHties of human brotherhood. A few 
years ago, at an International Postal Congress, as I 
recollect, a proposition was made that the charge for a 
letter between almost any two points on the surface of 
the globe be reduced to two cents. This was advocated 
by Egypt, the United States, and New Zealand. This 
proposition and those who supported it, representing 
at once the land of the oldest civilization and, on the 
opposite side of the globe, that of the newest, ought 
sufficiently to free us from the idea that our specu- 
lation can be limited to the bounds which circum- 
scribed that of the Greeks. 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 127 

(5) Reenforcing all these tendencies is the modern 
evolutionary view. The discovery, known as evolu- 
tion, that all things come about gradually and that 
one thing grows out of another, has perhaps done 
more than any other new element in our thought to dis- 
credit the ways of thinking that prevailed in ancient 
Greece and among the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages. 
As Professor John Dewey has pointed out, the very 
words *' Origin of Species " chosen by Darwin as the 
title of his book, embody a general intellectual revolt 
against the earlier assumptions, and a new intellectual 
temper, the full significance of which has hitherto 
scarcely been realized. The Greek thinkers were not 
wholly oblivious to the development of the world, but 
they knew little or nothing about the history of the 
globe or of mankind, and in general beheved in fixed 
kinds of things, — in distinct and immutable species, — 
and this beHef received the religious sanction of Chris- 
tian tliinkers. It carried with it as a natural corollary 
*'the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and 
final," and regarded ''change and origin as signs of 
defect and unreality." ''In laying hands upon the 
sacred ark of absolute permanency," Professor Dewey 
continues, "in treating the forms that had been re- 
garded as types of fixity and perfection as originating 
and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a 
mode of thinking that in the end was bound to trans- 
form the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment 
of morals, politics, and religion." Platonic ideas, 



128 THE NEW HISTORY 

Aristotelian essences, the Christian dogma of special 
creation, and "eternal verities" in general are in- 
volved in the debacle. ^ ' The human mind, deliberately 
as it were, exhausted the logic of the changeless, the 
final, and the transcendent, before it essayed adven- 
ture on the pathless wastes of generation and trans- 
formation." But now that it has engaged in this 
novel adventure its interest inevitably shifts ''from 
the wholesale essence back of special changes to the 
question of how special changes serve and defeat con- 
crete purposes ; shifts from an intelligence that shaped 
things once for all to the particular intelligences which 
things are even now shaping ; shifts from an ultimate 
goal of good to the direct increments of justice and 
happiness that inteUigent administration of existent 
conditions may beget and that present carelessness 
or stupidity will destroy or forego." ^ 

This evolutionary way of thinking is the inevitable 
result of the highly dynamic age in which we live. 
Even if it had not been shown by paleontologists, 
botanists, and zoologists that the now existing species 
of plants and animals had developed from preexisting 
species, the older philosophic concepts of the Greeks 
and Schoolmen must have ultimately given way before 
the general advance of scientific knowledge and the 
Industrial Revolution. The botanists and zoologists 
and the prehistoric archaeologists have furnished us 

* Dewey, John, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other 
Essays in Contemporaneous Thought, 1910, pp. 1-19. 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 



129 



with an astonishing and satisfying historical example 
of an evolutionary process, but even without this, the 
older philosophy based on fixed species and essences, 
and relying upon Aristotelian logic as an efficient 
method of attaining truth, was doomed. The dis- 
covery of organic evolution was the culmination, not 
the beginning, of a philosophical revolution. 

In view of what has been said, is it not clear that 
modern thought far transcends that of the Greeks in 
the accumulation and precision of the data on which 
it is founded, in the critical and historical methods of 
treating and interpreting this data, in the rejection of 
unsound philosophical assumptions and futile antith- 
eses which have proved a serious obstacle in the path of 
enlightenment, and, lastly, in the ingenious appHcation 
of knowledge to human needs? It is true that the 
Alexandrian Greeks received from Aristarchus the sug- 
gestion that the earth revolved on its axis and about 
the sun, from Archimedes and Hero illustrations of 
important mechanisms, and they knew of the Epicu- 
rean theory (later eloquently reproduced by Lucretius) 
of man's slow development, hut they were incapable of 
appreciating the importance of any of these suggestions. 
As Professor Dewey says, they seemed pledged to ex- 
haust the logic of the changeless, the final, and the 
transcendent, and consequently their game was bound 
to be played out sooner or later. But it seems as if 
our game can scarcely be played to an end. There is 
no reason to think that we are making more than the 



130 THE NEW HISTORY 



earliest discoveries and the crudest applications of 
knowledge as yet. The possibiHties of fruitful research 
seem unHmited and the influence of new knowledge 
incalculable. 

We have learned to think about a far wider range of 
things than any generation which has preceded us; 
we have learned to recognize that truth is not merely 
relative, as was clearly enough perceived by an im- 
portant school of Greek thought, but that this relativ- 
ity is conditioned by our constant increase in knowl- 
edge. Cicero declared that there was no possible view 
that had not been held by some philosopher, and that 
it was the part of the wise man to accept the opinion 
that appeared to him at the moment the most plau- 
sible. While there is much in Cicero's skepticism to 
admire, we should now state our phght in quite differ- 
ent terms. Our more carefully considered opinions 
are based ultimately upon observed facts about man 
and his environment. With our ever increasing 
knowledge in regard to these facts, our opinions must 
necessarily change. To what may be called the innate 
relativity of things, perceived by the Greeks, we have 
added a dynamic relativity which is the result of rap- 
idly advancing scientific knowledge, which necessarily 
renders all our conclusions provisional. 

In the career of conscious social readjustment upon 
which mankind is now embarked, it would seem as if 
the history of thought should play a very important 
part, for social changes must be accompanied by emo- 



REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 



131 



tional readjustments and determined by intellectual 
guidance. The history of thought is one of the most/ 
potent means of dissolving the bonds of prejudice and 
the restraints of routine. It not only enables us to j 
reach a clear perception of our duties and responsi- ( f 
bihties by explaining the manner in which existing 
problems have arisen, but it promotes that intellectual 
liberty upon which progress fundamentally depends. 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 



Should a student of the past be asked what he re- 
garded as the most original and far-reaching discovery 
of modern times, he might reply with some assurance 
that it is our growing realization of the fundamental 
importance and absorbing interest of common men 
and common things. Our democracy, with all its 
hopes and aspirations, is based on an appreciation of 
common men ; our science, with all its achievements 
and prospects, is based on the appreciation of common 
things. It is impossible to pause here to show how 
very true this is, nor is it needful to do so, for we all 
seem to recognize its truth by our presence here to-day 
to consider the particular problem before us.^ We 
have come together with a view of adjusting our edu- 
cation to this great discovery. It is our present busi- 
ness to see what can be done for that very large class 
of boys and girls who must take up the burden of life 
prematurely and who must look forward to earning 

* Read before the superintendents of schools of the larger cities at 
the meeting of the National Educational Association at Indianapolis, 
March 2, 1910. The general subject under consideration at this 
meeting was Industrial Education. 

132 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 133 

their livelihood by the work of their hands. But edu- 
cation has not been wont until recently to reckon 
seriously with the common man who must do common 
things. It has presupposed leisure and freedom from 
the pressing cares of life. 

This conception can be traced back to the Greeks, 
who estabhshed the tradition that education should 
be ''liberal " and based on ''liberal arts," by which they 
meant those studies and that training which they be- 
Heved appropriate for a freeman who was supported 
by slaves and who had before him a Hfe of leisure. 
When a particular study suggested in any way prac- 
tical usefulness, it lost forthwith its "liberal " character, 
for it could only be advantageous to a slave. It has 
proved very difficult to get away from this long-cher- 
ished conception of education, for we do not realize 
vividly enough the changes which have taken place since 
Aristotle painted his portrait of the "high-minded" 
man. The Greeks had neither democracy in our sense 
of the term, nor natural science as we understand it, 
with its multiform applications to Hfe. Slavery has 
disappeared, and the ancient occupations of the slave 
have undergone such a revolution, have been so di- 
versified and shown such possibihties of improvement 
with the advance of scientific discovery, that modern 
industry bears Httle resemblance to the simple handi- 
crafts of earher times. Industry has become exceed- 
ingly interesting and worthy. We have no right to 
exclude it from our education as the Greeks did. We 



134 THE NEW HISTORY 

have no excuse for continuing to harbor their prejudice 
against the practical, and must not permit ourselves 
to be dominated any longer by their notion of ''hb- 
eral" as something which must be kept carefully apart 
from the ^^ useful.'' It is high time that we set to work 
boldly and without any timid reservations to bring 
our education into the closest possible relation with the 
actual life and future duties of the great majority of 
those who fill our public schools. 

With this conviction firmly implanted in my mind, I 
propose to point out the role that history may be 
made to play in the education of boys and girls 
who are being taught to manage machinery and carry 
on other industrial operations with the immediate 
end of supporting themselves. When I first began 
teaching history, I must admit that I did not see its 
uses very clearly. This was due largely to the fact 
that I had a very inadequate notion of what the past 
of mankind really means for us. I have gradually 
come to realize how completely we are dependent on 
the past for our knowledge and our ideals; how it 
alone can explain why we are what we are, and why we 
do as we do. History is what we know of the past. 
We may question it as we question our memory of our 
own personal acts and experiences. But those things 
that we recall in our own past vary continually with 
our moods and preoccupations. We adjust our recol- 
lection to our needs and aspirations, and ask from 
it light on the particular problems that face us. 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 137 

subjects of discussion. This is a venerable tradition 
established by the Greek and Roman historians, 
Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus. Political his- 
tory is the easiest kind of history to write ; it lends 
itself to accurate chronological arrangement, just be- 
cause it deals mainly with events rather than with 
conditions. It must, moreover, have seemed more 
important to readers when kings and courts were far 
more conspicuous than they now are, and when fight- 
ing was regarded as the one unmistakably genteel 
pursuit of the leisure classes. Some writers justified 
it on the ground that this kind of history served as a 
guide to generals and statesmen who, by studying the 
past, might learn better to conduct an army to victory 
or guide the ship of state in the dangerous waters of 
civil commotion or foreign aggression. 

It is clear that our interests are changing, and conse- 
quently the kind of questions that we ask the past to 
answer. Our most recent manuals venture to leave 
out some of the traditional facts least appropriate for 
an elementary review of the past and endeavor to 
bring their narrative into relation, here and there, 
with modern needs and demands. But I think that 
this process of eliminating the old and substituting 
the new might be carried much farther ; that our best 
manuals are still crowded with facts that are not worth 
while bringing to the attention of our boys and girls 
and that they still omit in large measure those things 
that are best worth telhng. 



138 THE NEW HISTORY 

In order to make the situation quite clear, let us 
imagine that some broad-minded and sympathetic 
spirit, deeply impressed with the tasks that face us 
to-day, — like Maeterlinck himself, for instance, — 
had managed to learn a great deal about the past of 
mankind without ever looking into a standard history 
or an historical manual great or small ; that he had 
been guided miraculously to the real sources of his- 
torical knowledge and had familiarized himself with 
all the vestiges of the past thought and activities of 
mankind, not only the written records, but the re- 
mains of buildings, pictures, clothing, tools, and orna- 
ments. Let us suppose, then, that he undertook to 
prepare a book for children, in which he proposed to 
tell them what he believed would be most interesting 
to them, and most illuminating, as they grew up and 
began to play their respective parts in social Hfe. 
Would he dream of including the battle of ^gospotami, 
the Samnite wars, the siege of Numantia by the Ro- 
mans, the crimes of Nero, the Italian campaigns of 
Frederick Barbarossa, the six wives of Henry VIII, or 
the battles of the Thirty Years' War ? It is toler- 
ably safe to say that none of these things, which our 
manuals always include, would even occur to him as he 
thought over all that man had done and thought and 
suffered and dreamed through thousands of years. 

Our writer, not being especially interested in battles 
and sieges or the conduct of kings, and having no idea 
of teaching his readers how to be good generals and 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 



139 



statesmen, would in all probability select some other 
: thread for his narrative than the old political one. He 
might decide that what men knew of the world, or 
what they believed to be their duty, or what they made 
with their hands, or the nature and style of their build- 
ings, whether private or public, were far more sug- 
gestive to us than their rulers at particular times or 
the wars that they waged. So in considering the place 
to be assigned to history in industrial education, I have 
no intention, as I have already said, of advocating 
what has hitherto commonly passed for an outline of 
history. On the contrary, I suggest that we take up 
the whole problem afresh, freed for the moment from 
i our impressions of *' history" vulgarly so-called, 
i Let us begm by asking ourselves what, considering 
•. the needs, capacity, interests, and future career of the 
boys and girls in industrial schools, is it most necessary 
for them to know of the past in order to be as intelli- 
! gent, efficient, and happy as possible in the life they 
! must lead and the work they must do ? In order to 
I answer this question intelligently, we must first de- 
' ^ermine the position in which the pupils are placed, 
and the nature of the demands which their special kind 
of education imposes. Secondly, I propose to give 
some illustrations of those things in the social memory 
of mankind which are most essential for them to know 
and recall from time to time, and which I venture to 
think will prove more enlightening than any other 
} information that can be given them. 



140 THE NEW HISTORY 



II 



Industrial education is, of course, a form of technical 
education. Its most obvious immediate aim is to 
prepare boys and girls, thirteen to sixteen years old, 
to become skillful operatives as promptly as may be. 
With this technical training we are not here con- 
cerned. But industrial training may aspire to do 
much more than turn out efficient artisans who will 
satisfy their employers, and who will command 
higher wages and be eligible to a more rapid promo- 
tion than the untrained — fundamental as all this is. 
The industrial class is a very large one indeed, and it 
is obviously of the greatest moment to society that 
this class should be recruited from those who have 
been taught to see the significance of their humble 
part in carrying on the world's work, to appreciate the 
possibilities of their position, and to view it in as hope- 
ful a light as circumstances will permit. 

Now it must be admitted that the circumstances 
in which a boy or girl begins and continues work in a 
modern factory are far from cheerful. They are usu- 
ally very depressing, physically and mentally. A mo- 
notonous repetition of a series of motions continued 
hour after hour and day after day and year after year, 
in dingy and noisy surroundings, would seem on the 
surface to be all that there is of it. As Wyckoff has 
so truly said, the workmen carry on each his particular 
process without in the least knowing what it really 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 141 

means; consequently, they can have ''no personal 
pride in its progress, and no community of interest 
with their employer. There is none of the joy of 
responsibility, none of the sense of achievement, only 
the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing 
for the signal to quit work, and for their wages at the 
end." If this be true, how can the workers be ex- 
pected to have the least appreciation of the social and 
industrial value of their labor? How can they be 
expected to take an intelligent view of their responsi- 
biHties, or conceive rational plans for bettering their 
condition ? This is the general situation which those 
who organize industrial schools must face, fairly and 
squarely. 

In their endeavors to offset the existing e\als, I am 
convinced that they will be forced to summon history 
to their aid — not the history now to be found in our 
textbooks, but those phases of past human experience 
and achievement which serve to explain our indus- 
trial life and make its import clear. History alone can 
explain the existence of the machine which the opera- 
tive must tend. It is the very last hnk in a chain of 
marvelous discoveries reaching back hundreds 01 
thousands of years to the bits of flint which were among 
man's earhest implements and which may have started 
him on his long career of mechanical invention and 
social development. The operative will learn from 
history how the present division of labor, of which he 
seems to be the helpless victim, has come about ; he 



142 THE NEW HISTORY 

will perceive its vast social significance and will com- 
prehend the rather hard terms on which things get 
made rapidly, cheaply, and in great quantities. An 
understanding of this may suggest ways in which as 
he grows older, he can become influential in bettering 
the lot of himself and his fellows without seriously 
diminishing the output, and conciliate economic effi- 
ciency with the welfare of the workmen, — which is, 
after all, as important a problem as exists in industrial 
life. 

For example, it seems to an outsider as stupid as it 
is disastrous that, with the simplification of processes 
through the division of labor, there has not been a 
countervailing tendency to enable the workman to 
carry on in succession a series of contributions to the 
completed product. The grinding monotony might 
be relieved, from time to time, by a reasonable alter- 
nation of duties so as to bring into play a new set of 
muscles and of mental adjustments. There are, 
assuredly, a considerable number of disadvantages in 
prevailing practices which a more intelHgent, sym- 
pathetic, and alert set of workmen could cooperate in 
aboHshing or alleviating without serious economic 
sacrifice. 

Besides giving the artisan an idea of social progress 
and its possibihties, history will furnish him a back- 
ground of incidental information which he can utilize 
in his daily surroundings, and which will arouse and 
foster his imagination by carrying him, in thought, 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 143 

far beyond the narrow confines of his factory. It is 
impossible to do more than enumerate a few of the 
most conspicuous and impressive facts in man's devel- 
opment, which would arouse the attention of the boys 
and girls, and might, as the years went on, give them 
an outlook on Hfe that they would get in no other 
way. We might begin with the well-known fact that 
man is by no means the only artisan in our world. 
Without his tools, he would be unable to compete with 
the spider, the bee, or the wasp. Certain birds con- 
struct very elaborate dweUings for themselves and 
their families, but man's ancestors, to judge from his 
nearest relatives which exist to-day, could do no more 
than make a rude platform of boughs. When our dis- 
tant forebears began to walk firmly on their hind legs 
and thus found their hands free, then it was that their 
good, big brains began to undergo those changes that 
make them so superior to those of the highest apes. 
In this long process we may assume that two factors 
have been specially potent in developing the peculiarly 
human heritage of culture, as distinguished from the 
instinctive and often marvelous skill of other animals : 
these are language and the invention of tools. 

In the beginning, man was a far more clumsy and 
inefficient artisan than the wasp ; but he had the great 
advantage, if he happened to be particularly clever, 
of being able, not only to do something from time to 
time that his ancestors had never done, but to trans- 
mit this improvement to succeeding generations. How 



144 '^^^^ N^W HISTORY 

the wasp developed its skill we do not know ; but, as 
it now is, so it remains — it neither increases nor de- 
clines, as does human culture, for the simple reason 
that it does not have to be taught to each generation 
by the last. Could we imagine a child to-day grow- 
ing up absolutely untaught and unaffected by the 
example of those around him, he would, in all probabil- 
ity, be little superior in point of civilization to a ba- 
boon. In short, our achievements are not innate, — 
we owe practically all of them to past generations. 
The accumulation of culture and its transmission by 
education in the widest sense of the word is the 
chief distinction and duty of our species. A great 
part of our development, and a great part of the 
heritage that has been transmitted to us from age 
to age, is associated with our implements. By his 
tools man can be traced back through hundreds of 
thousands of years. Indeed, only the stones and bits 
of flint that he modified to his uses survive from the 
very remote periods. The French anthropologists 
have established a succession of eras in the history 
of the old stone men, based on the variety and finish 
of their implements. The history of man, then, 
begins with his industries; and I am not sure that 
his industries, in a broad sense of the term, have not 
always constituted as good a single test of his general 
civihzation and as satisfactory a clue to its vicissi- 
tudes as can be found. 
After the last advance of the ice sheet in Europe, 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 145 

and perhaps not more than seven to ten thousand years 
ago, the so-called '^ neolithic '^ phase of civilization 
clearly emerges, with its ground stone implements, 
its pottery, agriculture, and domestic animals. This 
stage, before the gradual introduction of metals, 
seems to have prevailed very generally in both the old 
world and the new. It Hes back of the civilization 
of Egypt and Babylonia; it was the condition in 
which the Europeans found the peoples of America, 
four centuries ago ; and it may still be studied in 
various parts of the earth where it continues to exist. 
There should be no difficulty in explaining vividly 
to a child this intermediate grade of civilization, — so 
compHcated from the standpoint of the chimpanzee, 
so simple from the standpoint of that of Greece or 
Rome. 

The recent discoveries in Egypt indicate that some 
four thousand years before Christ a marked advance 
beyond the neolithic age had already taken place 
there. A rapid and graceful system of writing had 
been developed, copper was beginning to be used for 
vessels, and, when properly hardened, it became avail- 
able for tools. The ancient Egyptian seems to have 
been an ever industrious and practical person, to 
whom business made a strong appeal. The book- 
keeper is a conspicuous figure in the paintings which 
have come down to us. The Egyptian's art was 
closely associated with his pecuKar environment and 
his industries. As Breasted has well said: "The 



146 THE NEW HISTORY 

lotus blossomed on the handle of his spoon, and his 
wine sparkled in the deep blue calix of the same 
flower ; the muscular Hmb of the ox in carved ivory 
upheld the couch on which he slept ; the ceiHng over- 
head was a starry heaven resting on palm trunk 
columns, each crowned with its graceful tuft of droop- 
ing foliage." 

The range of Greek manufactures might also easily 
be brought into instructive relation with both their 
art and their conceptions of Hfe, in such a way as to 
give a far more adequate notion of this extraordinary 
people than one is likely to derive from the textbooks 
that tell of their political assemblies and constant 
wars. We still have many examples of their lovely 
vases and cups and platters, their bracelets, earrings, 
and mirrors. We can form an excellent idea of their 
furniture as well as of their temples and theaters. 

While the Greeks prized beautiful things as no other 
people before them, so far as we know, manual labor 
was viewed with contempt by the leisure class. This 
could not be otherwise at a time when almost all in- 
dustrial operations were carried on by slaves, a class 
constantly recruited by captives, and sufficiently 
large to manufacture all the necessary commodities. 
Aristotle, in a famous chapter of his Politics, de- 
clares slavery to be in accordance with nature, since 
there is always a considerable class of persons fit 
for nothing else; although he admits that many 
become slaves through ill fortune who ought properly 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 147 

to be free, and that many others are free who have 
all the natural traits of slaves. The higher branches 
of science did not aim at usefulness, and owed their 
dignity to that fact. They could only be carried on 
by those who did not use their hands and who de- 
voted themselves to a leisurely, contemplative life. 
Seneca repudiates with warmth the idea that the 
practical arts were invented by men of exceptional 
genius. He declares that, on the contrary, they are 
vulgar devices of the lowest of humanity, and should 
be left to slaves. Moreover, Aristotle, in his Meta- 
physics, speaks as if all possible practical inventions 
had long ago been made. So the philosophers and 
the institution of slavery combined in ancient Greece 
to discredit industry. Thus it came about that the 
use of one's hands and head in the making of useful 
articles was condemned as degrading; and the more 
completely one could free himself from such useful 
employment, the more prospect he had of rising to 
the full dignity of a man and a philosopher. 

The Romans took over the Greek industries that 
suited their purposes, and these were transmitted to 
medieval Europe, with such modifications as change 
of taste and alterations in the general habits of Hfe 
called for. The growth of the towns in the twelfth 
century was accompanied by interesting developments 
of craft guilds, and the master workmen in the various 
trades began to play a far more important and digni- 
fied r61e in pubHc affairs than ever before. More- 



148 THE NEW HISTORY 

over, the common artisan ceased to be a slave, or 
even a serf, so that one of the gravest disadvantages 
attaching to manual labor in Greece and Rome dis- 
appeared in western Europe five or six centuries ago. 
The beginning of this rehabilitation of industry is, 
perhaps, reflected in the prevalence of surnames 
derived from homely occupations. The time came 
when no one was ashamed to be called Taylor, Turner, 
Weaver, Smith, Fuller, Cooper, Brewster, Hooper, 
Chandler, Fletcher, Potter, Horner, or Currier. 

From the thirteenth century on, there began to be 
premonitions that industry might sometime be revolu- 
tionized by new discoveries. A method of melting 
iron was discovered, for instance, so that it could be 
cast, instead of forged, after merely softening, as pre- 
viously. The alchemist, in his search for an elixir 
which would turn copper into gold, and lead into 
silver, and prolong life indefinitely, came upon hitherto 
unsuspected properties in the substances he experi- 
mented with, and so laid the foundations for what 
was to become apphed chemistry. Yet no very strik- 
ing changes in industry occurred before the eighteenth 
century. In the days of Louis XIV, when inventors 
were already becoming rather common, the people 
of western Europe still continued to spin and weave 
with very simple devices. Merchandise was still 
carried about on slow carts, and letters were as long 
in getting from London to Rome as in the time of 
Constantino. 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON T^IAN 149 

But two great truths were gradually dawning on 
the more thoughtful. One was the importance of the 
seemingly homely, common, and inconspicuous things 
about them ; the other was the possibility of making 
use of our knowledge of common things to promote 
the general welfare. Neither the ancient nor the 
medieval thinkers had paid much attention to the 
material world. They withdrew themselves from 
nature, and, as Lord Bacon said, they ^'tumbled up 
and down in their own reason and conceits," and 
sought the truth in their own Httle heads and not in 
the great common world about them. When men of 
first-rate ability turned from a consideration of the 
good, the true, and the beautiful, and of the precise 
relation of the three members of the Trinity to one 
another, and began to wonder what makes milk sour 
quicker in hot weather than in cool, and why an 
object seen through a glass bottle is magnified, they 
had already made the transitions from the old to the 
new attitude of mind. 

Patient observation, experimentation, and calcula- 
tion, in the spirit of modern research, did not begin 
to be carried on in Europe, on a large scale, before 
the opening of the seventeenth century; and since 
that time the progress in accumulating knowledge 
and applying it to the relief of man's estate has been 
absolutely without precedent in the history of the 
globe. The story of modern invention and of its 
revolutionary effects on our Hfe and our ideals of 



ISO 



THE NEW HISTORY 



progress cannot be even sketched out here. But it 
is infinitely more absorbing and vital than the record 
of kings, conquests, and treaties, and of the delibera- 
tions and decrees of public assemblies, which have so 
long been regarded as constituting orthodox history. 
Moreover, what child could fail to follow eagerly, 
if the matter were but clearly put to him, the marvel- 
'Ous doings of the steam engine, which has shown itself 
•/far more potent to alter man's ways than all the edicts 
of all the kings and parliaments that have ever 
existed. In 1704, an Englishman, Newcomen, devised 
an awkward form of steam engine, which would work 
a pump — a lumbering, slow, inefficient, unpromising 
contrivance, which was destined, nevertheless, to 
grow into the most rapidly revolutionizing force in 
the history of the world. The pump enabled the 
miners to keep under control the water that would 
otherwise have impeded them in extracting both coal 
and iron. By the use of the iron, new machines 
could be made, and with the coal, they could be run. 
So, with iron and coal and steam both old and new 
kinds of products could be turned out in unprece- 
dented quantities; and with iron, coal, and steam 
they could be dispatched to all parts of the earth. 
Factories equipped with the new machinery grew up, 
and cities centered around the factories. So it has 
come about that the tool has again come into its own 
as the agent and symbol of man's progress, and that 
the past one hundred and fifty years have seen vastly 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 151 

greater changes than the whole five thousand years 
that elapsed between the reign of King Menes I of 
Egypt and that of George III of England. Just as 
the use of a stick and a piece of flint began the in- 
tellectual development which slowly raised man above 
the ape in his habits of life, so a new method of 
operating his tools — the steam engine — ushered in 
an expansion of his activities, interests, and social 
and moral problems, the end of which is not yet. 

As we are all keenly and sadly aware, the Industrial 
Revolution, while greatly adding to our comforts and 
to the range of our experiences by bringing the whole 
world together and rendering it in a certain sense 
accessible to all of us through easy and rapid inter- 
communication, has left the mass of workers whose 
lives are passed in factories in almost a worse plight 
than that of the Greek and Roman slaves. It was 
evidently too much to expect of our western world 
that it should effect such an absolutely unprecedented 
metamorphosis of the material conditions of life, and 
at the same time guard against all the evils to which 
the tremendous changes involved might give rise. 
Long hours of monotonous mechanical work in tend- 
ing a tireless machine or in repeating some minute 
operation in the highly efficient but often inhuman 
division of labor on which our modern industrial sys- 
tem rests, together with insufficient and precarious 
wages and demoralizing concomitant conditions, form 
at present the debit side of the balance sheet. 



152 THE NEW HISTORY 

As an offset, promising speedy betterment, we have 
a growing sense of social justice, a higher appreciation 
of economic and social expediency, and an enthusiasm 
for democratic education. The unthinking charity 
of the Middle Ages has become the organized social 
work of to-day, which is begotten and fostered by a 
union of human sympathy and exacting scientific 
research. If the machine has produced a new form 
of slavery, it has also produced its antidote. It 
holds out the possibiKty of abolishing poverty alto- 
gether, in the sense of suffering from hunger, cold, 
and nakedness. For there is now energy enough at 
man's disposal, in steam and electricity, to* supply 
him with the necessities of life in such abundance that, 
if properly distributed, no one need be in physical 
want. What is still more fundamental, with the 
Industrial Revolution has come a respect, not to 
say veneration, for labor, which Aristotle would hardly 
have comprehended. Instead of dreaming of a per- 
fect existence, free from all participation in the task 
of supplying our material needs, Tolstoi and many 
others see the ideal life in a happy combination of 
useful manual labor and leisure. The effect on body, 
mind, and temper of productive manual work, carried 
on intelligently, under suitable conditions, and for 
periods adjusted to the strength of the worker and 
to his other duties in life, would unquestionably be 
most salutary. And while we have not yet arrived 
at this happy adjustment, except in rare cases, we 



HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 153 

at least no longer scorn manual labor as such, nor 
do we deem it inherently degrading. 

Let us return now to the question of the relation 
of all this to industrial education, which is in itself 
but the latest product of the long historic process 
which we have been tracing. To me it seems obvious 
that just the sort of facts that we have been reviewing 
are precisely those which we should be particularly 
anxious that the boys and girls in the industrial 
school should be aware of and should lay to heart, in 
order to gain that attitude of mind which not only 
would make them the best kind of artisans, but 
would give them an intelligent appreciation of their 
work and enable them to cooperate in the process 
of eliminating the evils from which they suffer. And 
how can these facts be so easily, so permanently, 
and so naturally impressed on the pupil's mind as by 
the kind of historical study which has been outlined 
in this brief summary of the long story of manual 
labor? Such study will not only meet the special 
needs of those whose education we are discussing, 
but it will furnish at the same time the best, perhaps 
the only, means of cultivating that breadth of view, 
moral and intellectual perspective, and enthusiasm 
for progress which must always come with a percep- 
tion of the relation of the present to the past. 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 



A HISTORICAL writer is always puzzled as to where 
to begin and end his story. For his own conven- 
ience and that of the reader he is accustomed to di- 
vide the past into epochs or periods. Having selected 
a terminus a quo and a terminus ad quern, as the Scho- 
lastics were wont to say, he proceeds to justify his 
boundaries as best he may. He knows well enough, 
particularly if he be a modern historian, that his 
divisions are highly artificial; he generally confesses 
this, but then does the best he can to obscure the fact 
in his endeavors to defend the divisions he adopts. 
This, indeed, is the regular procedure of the histo- 
rian, who has to reconcile the inexorable continuity of 
man's experiences with the demands of clear literary 
presentation, and, unhappily, he is usually all too skill- 
ful in concealing the violence he does to historic truth. 
The older historians may be forgiven on the ground 
that our conception of the continuity of history is 
essentially a modern one — a product of the nine- 
teenth century. Formerly it was believed that heroic 
men, decisive conflicts, or the intervention of God him- 
self broke here and there somewhat sharply the trend 

154 



"THE FALL OF ROME" l^^ 

I of human affairs. This view could be maintained 
only so long as merely the conspicuous events of the 
past attracted the attention of the historian. So 
soon, however, as he began to concern himself with a 
wide range of human interests, with the relatively 
permanent rather than with the episodic and tran- 
sient, he perceived that general changes are necessarily 
slow — very slow. 

This, as has been pointed out in a former essay, is 
due to two circumstances. The first is the intricacy of 
all the higher civilizations. If we consider the whole 
range of man's interests in the fifth or the tenth 
or the eighteenth century, we see that no single man 
or battle or treaty could possibly alter at once the 
prevailing religious, intellectual, artistic, scientific, 
Hnguistic, industrial, mercantile, legal, miHtary, and 
pohtical ideas and habits. A battle or treaty may 
change a people's ruler, a great pestilence may affect 
their economic situation, but there is no instance of 
any single circumstance producing an abrupt change 
in more than a small portion of human habits, cus- 
toms, and institutions. 

The second fundamental element in the continuity 
of history is inertia and lack of imagination. These 
two mental characteristics explain why even where 
there has been an abrupt change in a single field of 
interest a great part of the old has still been carried 
over into the new. A well-known example of this is 
,the perpetuation after the French Revolution of many 



J ^5 THE NEW HISTORY 

of those governmental peculiarities which were char- 
acteristic of France in the eighteenth century. ^ i 

In view of these facts we can but look with the 
utmost suspicion on all the traditional '^ periods" 
which are generally accepted in historical Hterature; 
because they appealed to our predecessors there is 
not the least reason for supposing that they can be 
defended now. 

Most of us were doubtless reared upon the idea that 
after the Fall of Rome the Middle Ages set in, and 
that then, after a long period of darkness, humanity 
was awakened from its winter sleep by the recovery 
of the long-lost writings of the Greeks and Romans. 
This escape from the Middle Ages, which is known as 
the Renaissance, prepared the way — such, at least, is 
the popular view of Protestants — for a great spiritual 
awakening which unmistakably ushered in modern 
times. The next crisis to attract general attention is 
the French Revolution. Our textbooks and our col- 
lege courses still adjust themselves to this series of 

epochs. 

Of course, every serious-minded historical student 
sees clearly the deficiencies of these divisions; he 
knows very well the difhculties of establishing the 
points at which the Middle Ages began and left off. 
It is especially difficult to tell where to place the be- 
ginning of modern times ; and as for the " Revolution,' 
we still seem to be in the midst of that. Historians 
do not, however, always perceive the positively mis- 



"THE FALL OF ROME" I^y 

chievous results of classifying our notions of the past 
under these headings. The "periods" spoken of 
above are not merely subject to criticism, they per- 
petuate a wholly wrong perspective of the past. 

It is becoming clear to the modem historical student 
that in the whole history of western Europe there is 
perhaps no sharper break than that which separates 
the earlier from the later Middle Ages. In the 
twelfth century there was an awakening of intellectual 
interest which created the universities, the revival of 
the Roman law, the codification of the canon law, 
the systematizing of the patristic theology; then, 
too, came the growth of urban hfe, the extension of 
commerce, the blossoming of Gothic architecture, and 
the development of Hteratures of great beauty in the 
vernacular languages. 

^ By the opening of the thirteenth century the atten- 
tion of mtellectual Europe was becoming centered on 
the greatest of the ancient philosophers, and his works 
were once more spread out before the eager eyes of 
western students. The so-called Renaissance offers 
nothing comparable to the achievements of the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries. It is true that in the four- 
teenth and fifteenth centuries the Italian towns 
developed an interesting civihzation and a marvelous 
art different from that which went before. These 
have perhaps blinded us to the relatively slight 
contributions of the period to general change. To 
one who is intent upon establishing the continuity of 



158 THE NEW HISTORY 

history the men of letters, the philosophers, and even 
the artists of the Renaissance, exhibit an extraor- 
dinary intellectual conservatism. They transcended 
relatively few of the ancient superstitions, contributed 
but Kttle to the knowledge of the world, and readily 
yielded to the fascination of Neoplatonic mysticism, 
as is illustrated by Ficino, Pico, and ReuchHn. 

As has been said elsewhere,^ it was quite possible 
to read the classics without becoming forthwith 
Hellenic in one's attitude of mind. It may be safely 
said that as one's acquaintance with the Middle Ages, 
as well as his appreciation of our own time, increases, 
the Renaissance seems to grow more and more 
shadowy as a distinctive period ; and yet many writers 
use the term as if the Renaissance were a bright 
spirit, hovering over Europe, touching this writer and 
that painter or architect, and passing by others who 
were in consequence left in medieval darkness. 

To those seeking to fix a date for the beginning of 
modern times, three events have suggested them- 
selves as plausible points of departure: the fall of 
Constantinople into the hands of the Turks in 1453, 
the discovery of America in 1492, and the posting 
of Luther's theses in 151 7. But none of these events 
appear to possess the importance commonly assigned 
to them. The assumption that the fall of Constanti- 
nople forced Greek scholars to earn an honest Hveli- 
hood by inculcating the rudiments of their classical 
1 See above, pp. 116 sqq. 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 1 59 

tongue among those western peoples who availed 
themselves of their services, and that in this way the 
knowledge of the ancient learning was once more re- 
vived, with all its accompanying enHghtenment, will 
of course not bear careful scrutiny. The revival of 
Greek learning had been going on in Italy for fifty 
years before the Turks took Constantinople. Aurispa 
and Filelfo had brought over large quantities of Greek 
manuscripts, and the Italian humanists were already 
busy translating them. It is true that certain Greek 
scholars settled in the West after the fall of Constanti- 
nople, but there is no indication that the trend of 
humanism was perceptibly affected by them ; so that 
the importance of this event, from an intellectual and 
literary standpoint, is probably negligible. 

As for the discovery of America, it should be re- 
membered that America was not discovered in the 
proper sense of the word in 1492 ; for Columbus died 
beHeving that he had merely reached India by a water 
route. Even as late as 16 10 Henry Hudson had hopes 
of reaching the Pacific by sailing up the Hudson. It 
may seem to us now as if the discovery of a new hemi- 
sphere must have produced a decisive widening of 
outlook, but the significance of the discovery dawned 
so slowly on the European mind that the effect was 
scarcely perceptible for decades. 

It is hardly necessary to consider the old assumption 
that Luther's scholastic disputation in regard to the 
meaning and implications of pcenitentia opened a new 



l6o THE NEW HISTORY 

epoch in the world's history. It is true that within 
fifteen or twenty years a certain number of northern 
European states had seceded from the Holy Roman 
Apostolic Church and had definitely rejected the head- 
ship of the pope. While the posting of the theses was 
not a wholly negligible factor in the situation, it cer- 
tainly had no direct bearing on affairs in Switzerland, 
England, or France. 

II 

Among the historical breaks that have been made 
famiHar to us by our textbooks and standard histories 
none is more impressive than the '' Fall of Rome." 
Here, if anywhere, one might be excused for expecting 
the opening of a new era. The German barbarians 
overwhelm the Empire, and the long line of imperial 
rulers beginning with Augustus is extinguished in 
Italy in the fatal year 476. It has been assumed that 
the dissolution of the Empire in the West was the 
beginning of a series of vital changes in Europe, — q 
yet this assumption, natural as it is, is to a great 
extent a mistaken one. The invasions of the Ger- 
mans doubtless produced in the long run important 
results, but these came about very gradually. In 
one sense there was really Httle novel in the early 
Middle Ages. Much was lost, but little was found. 
A great part of those things that we think of as char- 
acteristically medieval, — monks and saints and mir- 



"THE FALL OF ROME" l6l 

acles ; allegory and symbolism ; the seven liberal 
arts ; the Roman Catholic Church with its privileges 
and its peculiar relations to the civil government, — 
these were all well developed before Alaric took 
Rome in 410. The ''Fall of Rome," therefore, is, at 
best, a specious division which upon closer examina- 
tion ceases to have those impressive and decisive 
quahties which have so long been ascribed to it. 
The elements of continuity are more striking than 
the changes. The following somewhat careful re- 
consideration of what was happening in the fifth 
century will serve to illustrate the dangers we run 
in taking the traditional historical divisions seriously. 

The Roman Empire was still intact when Theo- 
dosius the Great died in 395. It was governed by a 
vast and elaborate bureaucracy of which we have an 
impressive picture in the official list of offices, which 
has come down to us, the so-called Notitia Dignitatum. 
A century later the western portion of the Empire was 
in a state of disintegration. We find kings of the 
Franks, Alemanni, Burgundians, West Goths, East 
Goths, and Vandals, each ruling over a more or less 
well-defined portion of the ancient Roman Empire. 

It is no longer possible to trace the process of dis- 
solution in detail ; indeed, the changes were so compli- 
cated, so varied, and so gradual that even if we were 
as well informed about the fifth century as we are in 
regard to the nineteenth, it would probably be impos- 
sible to give a clear account of the revolution, simply 



l62 THE NEW HISTORY 

because it was inherently irregular and obscure. In 
spite, however, of our ignorance respecting even the 
most conspicuous and startling external and public 
events, and in spite of the essential vagueness of the 
situation, writers like Gibbon and Hodgkin have ven- 
tured to give us very precise and plausible details 
about many of the men and events. They, and other 
writers, have also hazarded many explanations for the 
so-called ''fall" of the Empire. A friend of mine 
recently amused himself by making a collection of the 
reasons assigned in our historical manuals for the dis- 
aster, and found no less than fifty. And all of them are 
mere guesses. Even those most commonly accepted, 
such as the declining population of the Empire and the 
strength and vigor of the Germans, have been alleged 
by Fustel de Coulanges to be quite baseless. 

The aims of this essay are, first, to review very 
briefly the general character of the sources of informa- 
tion for the fifth century (all of which, such as they are, 
are readily available in our best American libraries) ; 
then to illustrate in a general way the external process 
of the disruption as it appears in the writers of the 
time. I shall speak especially of the alleged division 
of the Empire between the sons of Theodosius in 395, 
of the events preceding the capture of Rome by Alaric 
in 410, and lastly, of exactly what appears to have 
taken place upon the supposed ''fall of the Western 
Empire" in the year 476. 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 163 

III 

First, then, as to the sources, by far the most 
authentic are, of course, the laws and governmental 
orders which are preserved in the Theodosian Code 
and its supplements, the so-called NovellcE, and in the 
Justinian Code. No inconsiderable part of these 
edicts were issued in the fifth century, and they 
help to illustrate the organization of the Empire 
and the abuses which had developed in it ; they often 
give the names of officials, and sometimes even 
mention events. Unfortunately they are drafted in 
a pompous, oratorical style, and only become intel- 
ligible after some little study. 

We have no competent contemporaneous writer for 
the fifth century such as we have in that worthy re- 
tired soldier, Ammianus Marcellinus, who fought 
under the emperor JuHan, and whose admirable 
history closes with the defeat of Valens at Adrianople 
in 378. Over a century and a half elapsed after 
Ammianus laid down his pen before Procopius, the 
next capable writer whose histories have escaped de- 
struction, set to work to describe the campaigns of 
Justinian against the Goths, Vandals, and Persians. 
That there were histories written during this in- 
terval is clear enough, but only those which dealt 
especially with the church have come down to us in 
a complete form. After Ammianus deserts us we 
have to depend for the next generation upon Zosimus. 



1 64 THE NEW HISTORY 

He was a government official (Count) in the eastern 
part of the Empire and appears to have written in the 
latter — possibly the earlier — half of the fifth century. 
The closing portion of his work is lost, and the 
narrative breaks off with the events immediately 
preceding Alaric's capture of Rome. He was bitterly 
opposed to the Christians and ascribes the mis- 
fortunes of the time to the desertion of the old gods 
who had so long protected the commonwealth. 

Fragments of other, and possibly better, Greek his- 
torians have been preserved, especially by Photius, a 
scholarly prelate of Constantinople who lived in the 
latter part of the ninth century. He employed the 
leisure of a very troubled life in writing out brief 
analyses of the books in his library. In this way, an 
outline, at least, of some of the lost works has been 
saved; for example, the history of Olympiodorus, who 
treated the period immediately following the death of 
Theodosius the Great, and upon whom Zosimus relied. 
Another of the medieval excerpt-mongers, the erudite 
emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (died 959), 
ordered a vast collection to be made of all that was 
deemed best worth preserving in the works of the older 
historians. This material was classified in fifty-three 
books. Of the little that is still extant of this extraor- 
dinary undertaking, the two books containing accounts 
of the chief embassies are important. For instance, 
we owe to the emperor's enthusiasm for learning the 
preservation of a fragment from perhaps the best of 



THE FALL OF ROME 



I6S 



the fifth-century historians, — the account which 
Priscus gives of his visit to Attila, the king of the 
Huns. We also owe to him an extract from Malchus, 
a writer of the succeeding century, telling about the 
embassy which Odovacar sent to Constantinople in 
476. 

Among the church historians there are several who 
have been well known all through the Middle Ages 
and down to the present day. The most popular 
was Orosius, a young man who, under the inspiration 
of Augustine, prepared a general history of the world, 
with a view of discomfiting the heathen country peo- 
ple, pagani. His object was, he tells us, to ransack the 
annals of the past for horrors and disasters of every 
kind, — wars, pestilence, famine, earthquakes, inun- 
dations, and noteworthy crimes, — setting them forth 
in an orderly fashion with a view to demonstrating 
that the world had been no happier when the pagan 
gods were revered than it had been since the introduc- 
tion of Christianity. The last dozen pages of this 
Seven Books of History against the Pagans relate to the 
first eighteen years of the fifth century. He is recall- 
ing events which he assumes are known to everybody, 
and his only object is to show that those prospered 
who feared the Lord, while those who clung to the old 
gods met speedy destruction. It is evident, therefore, 
that Orosius can easily be taken more seriously than 
he in any way deserves. The most reckless and sensa- 
tional sermon of a professional revivalist of the present 



1 66 THE NEW HISTORY 

day would be as reliable a source of objective truth 
as he. 

Covering the first third of the fifth century we have 
the Greek ecclesiastical writers, Socrates, Sozomenus, 
and Theodoret. All of these are specially interested 
in heresies, monks, and miracles, and give far less in- 
formation than might be hoped for in regard to the 
trend of events. Indeed, very little can be had from 
them respecting the political history of the time. 

In the annalists we occasionally find brief accounts of 
events, although the compilers of annals were chiefly 
interested in giving a correct list of the successive 
consuls, and often skip a number of years with- 
out inserting a single occurrence. Some hints may, 
however, be derived from Prosper, who lived in 
the fifth century, and brought his annals down to 454 ; 
from Count MarcelHnus, who probably wrote under 
Justinian ; and from the vestiges of a supposed Ital- 
ian chronicle, which have been carefully collected by 
Mommsen. It would, however, be hard to exaggerate 
the vagueness and scrappiness of this class of sources. 

The lives of the saints occasionally refer to contem- 
poraneous events, although not very commonly. 
Some fight may be derived from the life of Bishop 
Epiphanius of Pavia, written by his successor, Enno- 
dius, about the year 505, in which there are allusions 
to Ricimer, Orestes, Odovacar, and to the troubles of 
the times. The scantiness of material leads the his- 
torical student to make the most of every hint ; even 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 167 

the poets have to be utilized, especially the panegyrists. 
At the opening of the century there was Claudian, 
an ardent admirer of Stilicho, who sung his praises 
in very good hexameters. Claudian was, however, 
not only a warm partisan, but any anxiety that he 
may have had to tell the truth must have been dis- 
couraged by the exigencies of an exacting prosody. 
The assertion that Alaric was given an office by the 
Roman government after his return £rom devastat- 
ing Greece is derived from a vague allusion to the 
matter in two of Claudian's lines. 

In the second half of the fifth century we have 
another well-known writer, Apolhnaris Sidonius. He 
lauds several emperors in turn, the first being his 
father-in-law, Avitus. His allusions are not more 
clear or rdiable than Claudian's; indeed, they are 
not so simple and direct. We have, however, a con- 
siderable body of letters from the pen of Sidonius, 
which indicate plainly enough that one might live in 
France in the latter part of the fifth century, with 
Burgundians, Gauls, and Franks all about, and still 
carry on one's hterary pursuits and escape the sum- 
mer heats in a delightful and perfectly appointed 
villa. Besides the letters of Sidonius we have those 
of a few other important men of the time, of Leo the 
Great, for instance, and of Ennodius, mentioned above.i 

» The sources for this period have been brought together and trans- 
lated into Enghsh by Prof. C. H. Hayes, An Introduction to the 
Sources relating to the Germanic Invasions (1909). 



J 68 THE NEW HISTORY 

IV 

Let us turn now to the disruption of the Empire. 
It is commonly asserted that the State was divided 
into two distinct parts upon the death of Theodosius 
(in 395), who left an Eastern Empire to his elder son 
Arcadius, and a Western Empire to Honorius. This 
notion is so inveterate and so commonly repeated with 
more or less elaboration in our manuals that it scarcely 
needs to be illustrated. I take the following state- 
ments from two much-used textbooks, not because 
they are more wrong than the others, but because 
they present conveniently and clearly what seems 
to be an erroneous conception of the facts. 

On the death of Theodosius the Empire was again divided 
between his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius. This marks 
the final separation in fact of the East from the West; after 
this it is proper to speak of tm Roman Empires. The eastern 
lasted for over a thousand years ; the western began to crumble 
almost at once and had disappeared as an empire within a cen- 
tury. 

Under the caption "Final Division of the Empire," 
in decisive, heavy-faced type, another writer says : — 
The Roman world was united for the last time under Theo- 
' dosius the Great ; from a.d. 39. to 395 he -"led as sole emperor 
Just before his death Theodosius divided the Empire between 
his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, assigning the former, who 
was eighteen years of age, the govermnent of the East and giving 
the latter, a mere child of eleven, the sovereignty of the West. 
This was the final partition of the Roman Empire, - the issue 

i 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 1 69 

of that growing tendency which we have observed in its immod- 
erately extended dominions to break apart. The separate his- 
tory of the East and West now begins. 

Three, at least, of the chief assertions made above 
are wholly erroneous. The Roman Empire was not 
divided but remained one ; Theodosius had never been 
sole emperor; and in no sense does the separate his- 
tory of the East and West begin with the death of 
Theodosius. A contemporary would have seen noth- 
ing epoch-making in the fact that Arcadius and Hono- 
rius succeeded their father, for Arcadius had been 
emperor as one of his father's colleagues for eleven years 
and Honorius for three. In the codes a number of 
laws are preserved, duly issued in the names of both 
father and sons. The fullest account, perhaps, that 
we have of this alleged division is in Orosius, who says 
quite simply, "In the year of the City 1149 Emperor 
Arcadius, whose son Theodosius [II] now rules the 
East, and Emperor Honorius, his brother, upon whom 
the Commonwealth still rests, began to exercise their 
common control over the realm, only with separate 
capitals " {Commune imperium diuersis tantum sedihiis 
tenere coeperunt, Bk. VII, 36). Zosimus is still 
more concise: ''The Emperor Theodosius, having 
consigned Italy, Spain, Celtica, and Lybia to his son 
Honorius, died of a disease upon his journey towards 
Constantinople." 

Orosius describes the conditions with perfect accu- 
racy as they are illustrated by the habits of the period 



I70 THE NEW HISTORY 

and by the laws in the Theodosian and Justinian codes. 
From the time of Marcus Aurelius, who chose Verus 
as his colleague in the year i6i, down to Diocletian, 
the laws of the Empire were not uncommonly issued 
in the name of two or more emperors. The plurality 
of emperors became the general rule after Diocletian, 
and most of the edicts are issued in the name of two, 
three, or even four Augusti. 

The existence at the same time of two or more per- 
sons who enjoyed the supreme prerogatives of Roman 
emperor seems to us nowadays a contradiction in 
terms. It did not seem so to the Romans, who had 
been accustomed, under their consuls and tribunes, 
from a very early time to the spectacle of two or more 
officials possessing exactly the same high prerogatives 
throughout the whole territory of the State, with only 
such informal division of responsibility as might be 
agreed upon between them. The relations between 
two or more emperors, all of whom were supreme, was 
determined in the same informal fashion : a son would 
naturally be subordinate to his father; the younger 
and less distinguished colleague to the older and better 
known one. 

The whole situation becomes quite clear when we 
refer to the accounts which Ammianus MarcelHnus 
has given us of imperial elections in his day. Julian, 
it should be remembered, had been killed near Babylon 
in 363 ; his successor, Jovian, died almost immediately 
after his election. 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 171 

The fatal course of events having culminated thus mourn- 
fully in the death of two emperors within such a brief interval, 
the army, having paid the last honors to the dead body of Jovian, 
which was sent to Constantinople to be interred among the other 
emperors, advanced toward Nicaea, where the chief civil and 
military authorities devoted themselves to an anxious considera- 
tion of the serious situation, and, as some of them harbored 
vain hopes, it was deemed necessary to seek for a ruler of dignity 
and proved wisdom. 

It was first rumored that a few persons were whispering the 
name of Equitius, who was at that time tribune of the first divi- 
sion of the Scutarii, but he was disapproved by the more in- 
fluential leaders as being too rough and boorish ; and their in- 
clination rather tended towards Januarius, a kinsman of Jovian, 
who was chief commissary of the camp of Illyricum. However, 
he also was rejected because he was at a distance, and Valen- 
tinian, since he was both well qualified and accessible, was 
elected by unanimous consent of all men and the manifest favor 
of the Deity. He was a tribune of the second division of the 
Scutarii, and had been left at Ancyra, it having been arranged 
that he should follow afterwards. And because no one denied 
that this choice was for the advantage of the Empire, messen- 
gers were sent to beg him to come with all speed ; but for ten 
days the Commonwealth was without a ruler. 

Upon Valentinian's arrival he was clothed with the 
imperial robes and crowned and saluted as Augustus. 
But as he attempted to speak, the soldiers raised an 
uproar, urging that a second emperor be immediately 
elected ; to this Valentinian replied : — 

I neither doubt nor question that there are many and ex- 
cellent reasons why in all serious emergencies a colleague should 
be chosen to share the imperial power ; and, as a mere man, I 



172 THE NEW HISTORY 

myself do fear the great accumulation of cares which must be 
mine and the various events which may occur. . •. . Fortune 
will, I trust, aid me while I diligently search for a wise and tem- 
perate partner. 

On reaching Constantinople, Valentinian, pondering 
upon the burden of urgent responsibilities which threat- 
ened to overwhelm him, decided to delay no longer, 
and accordingly led his brother Valens into a suburb 

where with the consent of all men — and indeed no one dared to 
object — he declared him emperor ; had him clothed in imperial 
robes and crowned with a diadem, and then brought him back 
in the same carriage with himself as the legitimate partner of 
his power, though, in fact, he was more like an obedient servant, 
as the remainder of my narrative wiU show. 

At this time the trumpet, as it were, gave the signal for war 
throughout the whole Roman world, and the barbarian tribes 
on our frontier were moved to make invasions into the territory 
lying nearest. The Allemani laid waste Gaul and Rhaetia ; at 
the same time the Sarmatae and Quadi ravaged Pannonia ; the 
Picts, Saxons, Scots, and Attacotti brought incessant woes upon 
the Britons ; the Austoriani and other Moorish tribes attacked 
Africa with more than usual violence ; predatory bands of the 
Goths plundered Thrace. 

After the winter had passed away 

the two emperors, in perfect harmony, one having been duly 
raised to power, the other having been, in appearance at least, 
associated in his honors, having traversed Thrace, arrived at 
Naessus, where they divided the counts [i.e. miltary command- 
ers] between them as if they were going to separate. . . . After 
this when the two brothers entered Sermium they divided the 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 173 

court [palatium] also, and Valentinian as chief proceeded to 
Milan, while Valens retired to Constantinople. 

Later, Valentinian during his campaign in Gaul fell 
ill, and a certain Rusticus Julianus, a government 
official, was proposed for future emperor; but others 
advocated Severus, an infantry captain. 

But all these plans were formed to no purpose, for in the 
meantime the emperor, through the variety of remedies applied, 
recovered and, realizing that he had been snatched from the 
jaws of death, proposed to invest his son Gratian, who was now 
on the point of arriving at manhood, with the ensigns of imperial 
authority; everything was accordingly prepared and the sol- 
diers made "solid" [milite firmato]. Immediately upon the ar- 
rival of Gratian, Valentinian, in order that all men might will- 
ingly accept the new emperor, advanced into the open space, 
mounted the tribune, and, surrounded by a brilliant circle of 
nobles and officers, took the boy by the hand and in a speech 
introduced their future sovereign to the army. 

When, seven years later, Valentinian died, 

it was decided, upon careful consideration, that the son of the 
deceased emperor, — also Valentinian by name, — who was then 
a boy four years old, should succeed to the imperial power. He 
was at that time one hundred miles off, living with his mother, 
Justina, in a small town called Murocinta. This decision was 
ratified by the unanimous consent of all parties, and Cercales, his 
uncle, was sent with speed to Murocinta, where he placed the 
royal child on a litter and so brought him to the capital. On 
the sixth day after his father's death he was declared lawful 
emperor and saluted as Augustus, with the usual solemnities. 
And at the time many persons thought that Gratian would be 
indignant that any one else had been appointed emperor without 



174 THE NEW HISTORY 

his permission ; yet afterwards, when all fear and anxiety were ,, 
allayed, they Hved in greater security because he, wise and kind- H 
hearted man as he was, loved his young relative with exceeding 
affection and reared him with great care. 

These passages ^ illustrate very clearly the informal 
methods of electing and multiplying emperors. There 
was, it will be noted, no attempt to divide the realm 
among them ; if there were several emperors, all were 
supposed to busy themselves with the common welfare 
of the whole Empire. 

The conditions under which Theodosius and his two 
sons ruled were precisely similar. No one thought 
of disrupting the Empire ; there was but one Common- 
wealth {res publico), although there had been two 
capitals since the founding of New Rome by Con- 
stantine. There were two senates, two completely 
organized imperial courts, but the Empire, whatever 
might be the number of rulers, was a single state. A 
new emperor, when elected, regularly requested his 
colleague or colleagues to accept him, and after the 
time of Theodosius one emperor regularly chose one 
of the annual consuls and the other one the other ; all 
laws were issued in the name and with the consent of 
all the Augusti who happened to be reigning. 

Viewed then from the standpoint of custom, there 
was nothing exceptional in the arrangement made 
after the death of Theodosius; the Empire was not 

1 They are taken from Bk. XXVI, ch. i, 3-5, ch. ii, 8, ch. iv, 3-5, 
ch. V, I, 4; Bk. XXVII, ch. vi, 1-5 ; Bk. XXX, ch. x, 4-6. 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 175 

divided except for administrative purposes, and there 
was little, if anything, that was novel in that. No 
''Western Empire" was created, and consequently 
there was no ''Western Empire" to fall in 476. 



On the death of Theodosius we find three miHtary 
politicians of German, or semi- German, extraction in 
charge of the forces of the Empire, — Stilicho, the 
Vandal, Gainas, a Goth, and Alaric, also a Goth, who 
had been assisting Theodosius in his last campaign. 
The only way to understand the peculiar position of 
these leaders is by noting their conduct in such detail 
as it is described to us by Zosimus, who gives us the 
fullest account of the years immediately following the 
death of Theodosius. We have no reason to sup- 
pose that his report of the necessarily dark and uncer- 
tain intrigues which were carried on is absolutely 
correct; yet the general spirit of the situation is 
clear, and he certainly says enough to rectify many 
current misapprehensions in regard to the relations 
of the barbarians and the Romans. 

It must always be remembered that there was no 
sharp line of demarcation between the heterogeneous 
inhabitants of the Roman Empire and the Germans, 
or even the Huns. Probably no questions were asked 
about a man's origin so long as he fitted fairly 
into the place that he affected to fill. The situation 



176 THE NEW HISTORY 

for several hundred years before the time of Theo- 
dosius had been similar to that which now exists 
in the United States, especially in the city of New 
York. A foreigner, as foreigner, is at no disadvantage 
here ; there are no artificial obstacles put in his way ; 
and so, in the time of Theodosius, the Germans drifted 
into the Empire in much the same way that the various 
foreign nations are drifting into the United States. 
They mingled with the Roman citizens in the same man- 
ner that aHens mingle to-day with our people, anxious 
to be reckoned American citizens as speedily as pos- 
sible. There was no lining up of Roman against 
barbarian ; the barbarian gladly fought for the Roman 
against his own people and exhibited very few traces 
of national feeling. We have little or no information 
in regard to intermarriage among the lower ranks of 
society, but it is obvious that in the highest rank 
there was no prejudice against mixed alliances. To 
cite only a few examples : we find Theodosius giving 
his favorite niece in marriage to Stilicho, and Stilicho 
both his daughters in succession to Honorius. Arca- 
dius married Eudoxia, the fair daughter of the Prank- 
ish leader, Bauto, and in due time Theodosius's daugh- 
ter, Placidia, alHed herself with Alaric's brother-in- 
law and successor, Athaulf (or Adolphus). 

Zosimus tells us that Theodosius the Great, imme- 
diately after his accession, began to conciliate the 
more important barbarian leaders, whom he treated 
with distinguished consideration, and even invited 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 177 

to his own table. He was known as the friend of the 
Goths, with whom he Hved on happy terms, naming 
Alaric and Gainas as his commanders and settHng a 
considerable number of the East Goths in the fertile 
lands of Phrygia. It must be observed, too, that 
there was absolutely nothing novel in this procedure, 
which was entirely in accord with the habits of the 
Empire for centuries. Perhaps the whole situation 
is best illustrated by the conditions which led to the 
capture of Rome by Alaric in the year 410. 

There had been for some years an active rivalry 
between the various barbarian commanders, who 
played the same important role in the politics of the 
time that our ahen poKticians do in our municipal 
affairs at the present day. Stilicho, Gainas, and 
Alaric had each been working for his own advantage. 
Alaric, almost immediately after the death of Theo- 
dosius, had made an incursion into Greece, where 
he had been weakly opposed by Stilicho; he had 
returned to the north and received some definite 
appointment in the Roman army. Just what this 
appointment was we cannot be sure, since Claudian 
only speaks vaguely of Alaric's having charge of the 
armories. StiHcho was very active and ambitious; 
he defeated Radagaisus and his army of barbarians, 
but in carrying out his later plans he appears to have 
encouraged the Vandals and Suevi to cross the Rhine 
into Gaul. As for Alaric, his first attempt to invade 
Italy in 402 was repelled by one of Stilicho's barbarian 



178 THE NEW HISTORY 

lieutenants, Saulus, but the court party, a few years 
later (in 408), induced Honorius to execute Stilicho. 
Zosimus tells us that after the execution of Stilicho 
many of the barbarians in Rome were killed, where- 
upon the survivors organized an army of thirty 
thousand men and invited Alaric to join them. 

Alaric was not, however, anxious for war ; he wanted 
some sort of an office, with a due amount of power and 
comfortable emoluments. He was ready upon very 
moderate terms to retire with his followers into Pan- 
nonia. The emperor Honorius failed, however, to 
come to terms, showing a culpable indecision, where- 
upon Alaric summoned his wife's brother, Athaulf, 
from upper Pannonia, where he had a considerable 
army of Goths and Huns. He then moved down to- 
ward Rome, to which he laid siege. But the city 
bought itself off with 5000 pounds of gold, 30,000 
pounds of silver, 4000 silk robes, 3000 scarlet fleeces, 
and 3000 pounds of pepper. Alaric once more de- 
clared himself ready to enter into an alliance with the 
emperor and the city of Rome against all their ene- 
mies. The barbarians then withdrew from Rome, 
but as they retired they were joined by almost all the 
slaves of the city to the number of forty thousand. 
This is suggestive of the highly miscellaneous char- 
acter of the persons who composed the alleged ''Ger- 
manic peoples," within the Roman Empire. 

Honorius refused to conclude a definite peace with 
Alaric, but his judicious prefect of the court, Jovius, 



"THE FALL OF ROME 



179 



resolved to send ambassadors to Alaric to request him to come 
to Ravenna, and told him they would conclude peace. Alaric, 
being prevailed upon by letters he received from both the em- 
peror and Jovius, advanced as far as Ariminimi, thirty miles from 
Ravenna. Jovius, who had been a friend and intimate acquaint- 
ance of Alaric in Epirus, hastened thence to treat with him. 
The demands of Alaric were a certain quantity of gold each year, 
a supply of grain, and permission for him and the barbarians 
who were with him to inhabit both the Venetias, Noricum, and 
Dalmatia. Jovius, having written down these demands in the 
presence of Alaric, sent them to the Emperor with other letters 
which he privately dispatched to him, advising him to appoint 
Alaric" commander of both the cavalry and infantry, by which 
means he might be induced to reduce his demands and make 
peace on moderate terms. 

Honorius, however, still refused to ratify the pro- 
posed terms. Alaric, irritated by his failure to get 
a more advantageous position in the Roman service, 
proposed to march once more on Rome. The news, 
however, that Honorius had called to his aid ten 
thousand Huns, led Alaric to repent his haste, and he 
sent the bishops of the various towns which he had 
been occupying to expostulate with Honorius, 

to say that the barbarians cared for no offices, that they would 
settle in the Noricums, which were harassed by continual in- 
vasions, and that they would accept such annual allowance of 
grain as the emperor might think fit, and would remit the gold. 
Moreover, that a friendship or alliance should subsist between 
himself and the Romans against every one who should rise up 
against the Empire. 



l8o THE NEW HISTORY 

These terms Zosimus declares to have been very 
reasonable, and he deplores the want of wisdom on 
the part of Honorius in rejecting them. 

The reader, familiar only with the ordinary ac- 
counts of the "wanderings of the nations," will natu- 
rally be surprised to learn that the Romans had thus 
early begun to employ the Huns as mercenaries, and 
will also be surprised at the courteous and deliberate 
negotiations carried on by Alaric through the clergy. 
Alaric, of course, had probably lived a great part of 
his life in the Roman Empire and was no more of a 
barbarian than hundreds of the Roman military and 
civil officers of the time. He evidently would have 
been satisfied could he have occupied a position similar 
to that which Stilicho had enjoyed under Theodosius. 

Insulted by the refusal of Honorius to meet his 
advances, Alaric once more laid siege to Rome. He 
cut off its supplies from Africa and demanded that 
the city join him against the emperor, who had fled 
to Ravenna. 

The whole senate [Zosimus says], having therefore assembled 
and having deliberated about what course they should follow, 
complied with all of Alaric 's demands. . . . They received his 
embassy and invited him to their city, and, as he commanded, 
placed Attains, the prefect of the city, on an imperial throne in 
a purple robe and crown. Attains then appointed Lampadius 
prefect of palaces, Marcianus prefect of the city, and gave the 
command to Alaric and a certain Valens, who formerly com- 
manded the Dalmatian legions, distributing the other offices 
in a proper fashion. 



"THE FALL OF ROME" l8l 

Attalus promised arrogantly to subdue the whole 
world. This so delighted the Romans that they were 
^'full of joy, having not only acquired new magistrates 
well acquainted with the management of affairs, 
but likewise TertuUus, with whose promotion to the 
consulship they were exceedingly gratified." But 
the inefficiency of Attalus in maintaining communica- 
tion with Africa, from whence the supplies for Rome 
came, led to his speedy deposition by Alaric. He 
took Attalus to the city of Ariminum, where he then 
resided, and stripping him of diadem and purple robe, 
sent them to the emperor Honorius. 

It thus appears that Alaric, instead of sweeping 
down upon the capital of the world at the head of the 
great Visigothic nation, was pathetically anxious to 
carry out his purposes in a peaceful fashion. When 
he found that he could not manage an emperor of 
his own, he was ready once more to open negotiations 
with Honorius. The rather full report which Zosimus 
gives, based very probably upon the contemporaneous 
Greek writer, Olympiodorus, breaks off at this point, 
and we do not know exactly what led Alaric finally 
to lay siege once more to Rome. 

The elaborate account in several pages which Gib- 
bon gives of the sack of Rome is largely the product 
of his reconstructive imagination. From the con- 
temporaries we learn next to nothing. Orosius, then 
a young man, anxious to prove that Christian influ- 
ence, instead of precipitating the capture of the city, 



l82 THE NEW HISTORY 

served to shield many persons from the violence of 
Alaric's followers, gives one or two instances of the 
respect shown by the Goths toward the holy edifices, 
and alleges that the barbarians retired voluntarily 
on the third day, having burned a few houses. ''Re- 
cent as is the event," he declares, writing less than ten 
years after, ''no one would suppose now that anything 
had happened in Rome except for the ruin of a few 
structures" {nisi adhuc aliquantis existentihus ex 
incendio ruinis forte doceatur). 

As the prefect of the city, RutiHus Namatianus, 
was leaving Rome some five years after Alaric's 
occupation, he burst into song, and in elegiac verse 
greets the beautiful queen of the world as she reposed 
in her glory on the banks of the Tiber. There is 
no lament over recent havoc, but only a confident 
prophecy of Rome's eternal and universal empire. 

Procopius, a writer of Justinian's time, over a cen- 
tury later, gives in his Vandalic War a very contra- 
dictory account of how Alaric took the city. Some 
allege, he tells us, that the Gothic king sent a gift 
of three hundred handsome youths to the nobility 
of the city; these young men, when their masters 
were asleep after dinner, opened the gates to their 
fellows; but others claim, he adds, that the gates 
were opened by a matron of the senatorial class, 
Proba, who, out of pity for the poor of the city, who 
were reduced to cannibahsm, ordered her servants to 
admit the enemy by night. 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 183 

Gibbon's plan of extracting ''from the improbable 
story of Procopius the circumstances which had an 
air of probability'' was, of course, hazardous in the 
extreme. The two accounts which Procopius gives 
are not only improbable, — they are perfectly con- 
tradictory. It may be added that it is to Procopius 
alone that we owe the oft-repeated anecdote of 
Honorius and his hen, Roma. While the historic 
basis of the anecdote is obviously of the slightest, 
it is one which perhaps merits perpetuation on account 
of its inherent charm. 

Alaric died, as we all know, soon after he left Rome 
on his way southward to insure communication be- 
tween Rome and Africa, for Rome was dependent on 
Africa for its food supply. His successor, Athaulf, 
married his hostage, the half-sister of Honorius, and 
carried on, first in Italy and then in Gaul, a series 
of political intrigues very similar to those of his de- 
ceased brother-in-law, Alaric. Attains was once more 
set up as emperor and again given up as a failure, so 
that Orosius speaks humorously of this weak tool of 
the Gothic kings as ''made, unmade, remade, and de- 
made" {facto, infedo, rejecto, dejecto). Orosius also 
reports a remarkable saying of Athaulf : 

At first [Athaulf was wont to say] I ardently desired that the 
Roman name should be obliterated and that all Roman soil 
should be converted into an empire of the Goths and be so called ; 
I longed that "Romania," to use a common expression, should 
become Gothia, and Athaulf be what Caesar Augustus was. But 



1 84 THE NEW HISTORY" 

I have been taught by much experience that the unbridled 
Ucense of the Goths will never admit of their obeying laws, and 
without laws a state is not a state. I have therefore assumed 
the safer course of aspiring to the glory of restoring and increas- 
ing the Roman name by Gothic vigor ; and I hope to be handed 
down to posterity as the initiator of the Roman restoration, 
since it is impossible for me to change the form of the Empire.^ 



VI 

After we are deserted by Zosimus and Orosius, the 
information in regard to the fifth century becomes very 
slight indeed. The annals are meager in the extreme, 
and the statements of Procopius, written long after, 
are very unreliable. It is clear, however, that the 
successive barbarian chieftains continued to negotiate 
with one another and with the Empire in the same 
way that they had in the time of Stilicho and Alaric. 
It is evident, too, that the West Gothic kings main- 
tained the general form of the old government, its 
administration and laws. We know less about the 
little Burgundian kingdom ; and such accounts as 
we have of the Vandals in northern Africa were written 
by orthodox Christians who were particularly occupied 
with the horrors of the Arian doctrines which the 
barbarians professed. 

In Italy, after Stilicho, the most important mili- 
tary leader for a long period was the ''patrician," 
^tius. He had had long experience at the Hunnish 
1 Adversum Paganos, Bk. VII, 43. 



"THE FALL OF ROME" ^ ig^ 

court, had been at the head of Hunnish mercenaries 
and was well qualified to organize the successful alli- 
ance against Attila which led to his defeat in eastern 
Cxaul m 451. He was followed by Ricimer, who en- 
joyed the title of "patrician" and exercised functions 
analogous to those of a New York boss. 
_ After the death of the inefficient Valentinian III 
m 4SS, emperors succeeded one another in the West 
with startling rapidity. Maximus, who is said to have 
killed Valentinian III, was himself killed within a few 
months; and in the same year, 455, we have reigning 
ior a brief time Avitus, the candidate of the West 
Gothic king, Theodoric II. It was necessary, however 
to find a more efficient man to oppose the Vandals 
who were now threatening Rome from Africa, and 
Boss Ricimer consented to the selection of Majorian 
as emperor (455-461). He was a well-meaning com- 
mander, who had formerly been associated with Rici- 
mer. His chief distinction is perhaps the part he 
played as " the man with the muck rake," since his 
arraignment of the official corruption of the times 
would have been gratefully received and well paid for 
had there been an Everybody's Magazine or McClme's 
to promulgate his exposures. But Ricimer was 
dissatisfied with him, and in 461 he substituted 
beverus, who reigned four years, but about whom 
the records give us no information. After the death 
of Severus, Ricimer took no steps to fill his place 
and two years elapsed before the emperor in the East' 



1 86 THE NEW HISTORY 

Leo, associated with himself a family connection, 
Anthemius. We have in Ennodius's Life of Bishop 
Epiphanius a rather lively accounc of the relations 
between the new emperor and the barbarian boss. 
Ennodius declares that Ricimer conducted the com- 
monwealth second only to Anthemius ; that Ricimer 
regarded Anthemius as a sHppery fellow, and Anthe- 
mius on his part declared Ricimer a hairy barbarian 
with whom no one could get on. In 472 Ricimer set 
up an anti-emperor, Olybrius, but both emperors 
were carried off the same year by disease. 

The next year a new candidate for emperor ap- 
peared. Glycerins, an enterprising soldier who was 
supported by the Burgundian king. At the same time 
Julius Nepos, who was in command in Dalmatia, 
assumed the imperial title with the sanction of the 
emperor Zeno at Constantinople. The annals tell 
us succinctly enough that at Tortus, near Rome, 
Glycerins was made bishop, while Nepos became em- 
peror. On the death of Ricimer a new and expe- 
rienced barbarian leader, Orestes, who had formerly 
been Attila's secretary, became "patrician," and he 
it was who made his httle son, Romulus Augustulus, 
emperor at a time when there were already two 
emperors in the West, Glycerins and Nepos, while 
Zeno was repelKng a rival in the East. 

It has been necessary to review the circumstances 
which led up to the famous deposition of the little 
Romulus, in order to see the whole bearing of an 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 187 

event which has long been viewed as synonymous with 
the fall of the '' Western Empire." Let us see now 
just what information the contemporaries give us in 
regard to the events of the year 476. It is hardly 
necessary to say that none of our information comes 
from any one who claims to have seen anything he 
narrates ; most of it, indeed, comes from those who were 
far removed in time or space from the scene of the 
events. Cassiodorus, the famous minister of Theo- 
doric, was not born till some years after 476. In his 
Chronicle, written forty years later, he says simply: 
^'a.d. 475 — This year, after Nepos had fled to Dal- 
matia, Orestes gave the imperial power to his son 
Augustulus." Under 476 he says : ''During this con- 
sulate Orestes and his brother Paul were killed by 
Odovacar, who assumed the title of king but did not 
use the purple or royal insignia." It would seem clear 
that Cassiodorus did not perceive in the events any- 
thing which might properly be regarded as suggesting 
the fall of the Empire. 

We have the fullest account, perhaps, of the events 
in a fragment of an Italian chronicle by some unknown 
writer of about the middle of the sixth century.^ All 
we know of him is that, as Mommsen has said, he 
was evidently a Christian man of ''almost infantile 

* The so-called "Valesian fragment," which owes its name to its 
French editors of the seventeenth century, the Valois (Valesii), 
may be found at the end of the Teubner edition of Ammianus 
Marcellinus. 



1 88 THE NEW HISTORY 

simplicity/^ with a style bordering on illiteracy. He 
writes as follows : — 

While Zeno, the Emperor, was reigning at Constantinople 
the patrician Nepos, coming suddenly to Portus, deprived Gly- 
cerins of imperial power. Glycerins was made a bishop and 
Nepos emperor at Rome. Nepos came presently to Ravenna, 
but, fearing the patrician Orestes, who was following him with 
an army, took ship and fled to Salona. There he remained five 
years, and was assassinated by his own followers. 

Soon after his departure Augustulus was made emperor 
and reigned ten years [ ! ]. Augustulus, who before his reign had 
been called Romulus by his parents, was made emperor by his 
father, the patrician Orestes. Odovacar, however, with the 
people of the Scyrri, coming suddenly on the patrician Orestes, 
killed him at Piacenza, and afterwards his brother Paul in the 
pine woods outside Classis [the port of Ravenna]. He took 
Ravenna, moreover, and deposed Augustulus, but had compas- 
sion on his youth and beauty, and spared his life besides paying 
him a smn of six thousand solidi. He sent him into Campania, 
where he lived undisturbed with his relatives. His father, 
Orestes, was a Pannonian, who had attached himself to Attila 
when the latter came into Italy and had been made his sec- 
retary, whence he had been advanced until he had reached the 
dignity of patrician. 

Procopius, the famous historian of Justinian, writ- 
ing about 550, gives a little more detail, but he tells us 
nothing of his sources, and his data were collected 
some seventy years after the events. In the opening 
of his Gothic War he says : — 

While Zeno was reigning at Byzantium the power in the 
West was held by the Augustus whom the Romans nicknamed 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 189 

Augustulus because he succeeded to the Empire in early youth. 
His father, Orestes, a very prudent man, was regent. Some 
time previously the Romans had received as allies the Scyrri and 
Alani and other Gothic [German] tribes, after the defeats they 
had suffered from Alaric and Attila, of whom I have written in 
former books. The fame of the Roman soldiers decreased in 
proportion as that of the barbarians increased ; and under the 
specious name of "alliance" they fell under the tyrannical sway 
of the intruders. The impudence of the latter grew to such an 
extent that after many concessions had been willingly made to 
their needs, they at length wanted to divide the entire arable 
land of Italy among themselves. Of this they demanded a third 
part from Orestes, and when he refused them, they straightway 
slew him. Among these barbarians was a certain imperial 
guardsman, Odovacar, by name, who then promised them the 
fulfillment of their desires if they would appoint him to the com- 
mand. After he had thus usurped the rule he did no other injury 
to the emperor, but allowed him to live as a private citizen. To 
the barbarians he handed over the third of all arable land, by 
which act he assured their devotion to himself ; and he held his 
usurped power ten years. 

In the vast collection of extracts prepared at the order 
of the learned emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus 
in the tenth century we have a fragment from the 
historian Malchus, of Philadelphia in Syria, who pre- 
pared a history covering the period from 474 to 480. 
He wrote in the early part of the sixth century and 
thus reports an embassy sent by the Roman senate to 
the emperor in the East, asking that Odovacar be 
made ''patrician," a title which the barbarian bosses 
had commonly enjoyed during the previous decades. 
The extract is interesting for many reasons and, as I 



igo THE NEW HISTORY 

shall show, furnishes an instance of the carelessness, 
bordering upon unscrupulousness, which may now 
and then be noted in the writings of Gibbon and 
others of equally distinguished scholarship. 

The Greek of Malchus, literally translated, reads as 
follows : — 

. . . Odovacar compelled the senate to dispatch an em- 
bassy to the emperor Zeno to inform him that they no longer 
needed an emperor of their own; a common emperor would be 
sufficient who alone should be supreme ruler of both boundaries 
[ot the empire] ; that they had, moreover, chosen Odovacar to 
guard their interests, since he had an understanding of both 
poHtical and mihtary affairs. They therefore begged Zeno to 
honor him with the title of patrician and to commit to him the 
diocese of the Italians. The men from the Roman senate ar- 
rived, bringing this message to Byzantium. 

During these days there came also messengers from Nepos, 
who were to congratulate Zeno on what had taken place [namely, 
the overthrow of his rival Basiliscus] and ask him at the same 
time zealously to aid Nepos, who had been suffering in the same 
way as he, to regain his power, by supplying money and an army 
and all things necessary to effect his restoration. Those who 
were to say these things were accordingly dispatched by Nepos. 

But Zeno made the following reply to the men from the senate, 
namely, that of the two emperors they had received from the 
East, one they had driven out, while Anthemius they had kUled. 
What should be done under the circumstances they must surely 
perceive. So long as an emperor still lived there was no other 
policy possible except that they should receive him when he 
returned. 

To the men from the barbarian [i.e. Odovacar] he replied 
that it would be wise for Odovacar to receive the dignity of pa- 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 191 

trician from the emperor Nepos ; but that he himself would send 
it, should Nepos not anticipate him ; and he praised Odovacar 
because he had shown a tendency to preserve the order estab- 
lished by the Romans, and trusted therefore that Odovacar, if 
he wished to do the fair thing, would receive the emperor who 
had paid him these honors. And sending a royal letter to Odo- 
vacar expressing his wishes, he addressed him as patrician. 

Nothing whatever is said of Romulus Augustulus, 
who has really no claim to be ranked as an emperor, 
since he was no more than his father's (Orestes's) 
unsuccessful candidate for the office. 

We have now reviewed all the immediate sources 
of the events of 476. Let us see, then, what Gibbon, in 
his thirty-sixth chapter, makes of this extract from 
Malchus. 

Odoacer had resolved to abolish that useless and expensive 
office [of emperor] ; and such is the weight of antique prejudice 
that it required some boldness and penetration to discover the 
extreme facility of the enterprise. The unfortunate Augustulus 
was made the instrument of his own disgrace ; he signified his 
resignation to the senate ; and that assembly, in their last act 
of obedience to a Roman prince, still affected the spirit of free- 
dom and the forms of the constitution. An epistle was ad- 
dressed, by their unanimous decree, to the emperor Zeno, the 
son-in-law and successor of Leo, who had lately been restored 
after a short rebelUon to the Byzantine throne. They solemnly 
"disclaim the necessity, or even the wish, of continuing any 
longer the imperial succession in Italy, since, in their opinion, 
the majesty of a sole monarch is sufficient to pervade and protect, 
at the same time, both the East and the West." In their own 
name, and in the name of the people, they consent that the seat 



192 THE NEW HISTORY 

of universal empire shall be transferred from Rome to Constan- 
tinople; and they basely renounce the right of choosing their 
master, the only vestige that yet remained of the authority that 
had given laws to the world. The Republic (they repeat that 
name without a blush) might safely confide in the civil and mili- 
tary virtues of Odoacer ; and they humbly request that the em- 
peror would invest him with the title of patrician and the ad- 
ministration of the diocese of Italy. 

The deputies of the senate were received at Constantinople 
with some marks of displeasure and indignation. . . . But 
the prudent Zeno soon deserted the hopeless cause of his abdi- 
cated colleague [namely, Nepos]. His vanity was flattered by 
the title of sole emperor and by the statues erected to his honor 
in the several quarters of Rome; he entertained a friendly 
though ambiguous correspondence with the patrician Odoacer ; 
and he gratefully accepted the imperial ensigns, the sacred orna- 
ments of the throne and the palace, which the barbarian was 
not unwilling to remove from the sight of the people. ^ 

It will be observed that there is but a slight resem- 
blance between the alleged extract from Malchus, 
which Gibbon encloses in quotation marks, and the 
literal translation of the Greek. There is, in the 
original, no mention of the word ^'Republic,'' and 
even if there had been. Gibbon must have known 
that the word respublica, or its equivalent in Greek, 
would have had in those days nothing of the meaning 
of ^'republic " in our sense of the word. It was simply 
a colorless synonym for '^ state" or "commonwealth." 

Most extraordinary of all is the statement that 
Zeno "gratefully accepted the imperial ensigns, the 

1 Vol. IV, pp. 50-51 of Bury's edition. 



"THE FALL OF ROME" 1 93 

sacred ornaments of the throne and palace, which the 
barbarian was not unwilKng to remove from the sight 
of the people." Any reader would infer that there 
was some evidence of the transmission by Odovacar 
of the imperial insignia to Constantinople. As a 
matter of fact this oft-repeated story is practically 
without foundation. In that bit of Italian chronicle 
already quoted (known as the Valesian fragment), 
resting upon an entirely different basis from the report 
of Malchus, we find the statement that after Theodoric 
had, in the year 493, killed his rival Odovacar he made 
peace with the emperor Anastasius ; that Anastasius 
''returned all the ornaments of the palace which 
Odovacar had sent to Constantinople." Whatever 
these ornamenta palatii may have been no one knows, 
— the bric-a-brac from the parlor mantelpiece, for 
aught we can say. We are in no way justified in 
assuming that they were ''the imperial insignia," and 
certainly there is absolutely no evidence that they 
were sent, as Gibbon and even Hodgkin assume, at the 
time of the embassy reported by Malchus. 

Now, to sum up our review of a momentous 
century, it becomes clear, as we examine the scanty 
bits of information that have come down to us, that 
the commonly accepted notions of the progress of 
affairs during the break-up of the western portions of 
the Roman Empire in the fifth century are apparently 
foundationless. (i) Theodosius the Great was never 
sole ruler ; (2) he never divided the Empire between his 



194 THE NEW HISTORY 



two sons, Arcadius and Honorius ; (3) there was never 
a '^Western Empire'' — at least before Charlemagne's 
time ; (4) there was little race feeling between the older 
inhabitants of the Empire and the Germans, who 
freely intermarried even in the higher ranks of so- 
ciety ; (5) Alaric was not the reckless leader of a wild 
barbarian race which swept down upon the capital of 
the world, but a prudent and hesitating pohtician 
addicted to prolonged negotiations ; (6) Rome was not 
permanently injured by his brief occupation in 410; 
(7) there was no fall of the Western Empire in 476,' 
since there was no Western Empire to fall, and nothing 
decisive appears to have happened during that year, 
for (8) there is no reason to regard Romulus Augus- 
tulus as having been properly an emperor at all, or 
(9) to assume that Odovacar ever sent the imperial 
insignia to Constantinople. 



^^THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789'* 



Nearly a century and a quarter has elapsed since 
the French National Assembly issued a remarkable 
manifesto in which it discussed the nature, extent, and 
general beneficence of the Revolution. After only 
six or seven months of work the Assembly ventured to 
claim that under its auspices "an old and corrupt 
nation had been born again into liberty" ; the rights 
of man, misconceived and insulted for centuries, had 
been reestablished for all mankind ; privileges without 
number which had formed the pubHc law of France 
had been abolished forever. ''Is there a single citi- 
zen worthy of the name," it exclaims, ''who dares to 
look back, — who would once more rebuild the ruins 
which surround us in order to contemplate again the 
former structure?" 

Yet not a few have dared to look back with regret, 
even with yearning, upon that Ancien Regime whose 
ruins the Assembly so plentifully sowed with the salt 
of its contempt. Indeed, a writer of our own day, M. 
Charles d'Hericault, solemnized the one hundredth 
anniversary of the meeting of the Estates General by 
rebuilding the ancient edifice with idyllic grace and 

19s 



196 THE NEW HISTORY 

peopling it with a happy and virtuous throng who had 
lived together in blessed concord until they suffered 
themselves to be alienated from God and their king 
by the satanic obsession of the Revolution. Accord- 
ing to M. d'Hericault, the Ancien Regime had served 
to develop ''in the highest degree in each social class 
those particular qualities required in order that all 
might work together toward the organization of a 
perfect society. There was, first of all, the priest, 
wise, venerable, devoted ; then the former despot, now 
transformed into a courtly and respected king; and 
the soldier, now a poHshed nobleman, the soul of 
honor. The bourgeoisie were rich, dignified, and well 
educated ; lastly the people, pious and gentle, consoled 
themselves for the lesser troubles of life by amassing 
wealth, by singing and dancing, while they met their 
graver misfortunes by the thought of heaven." 

But all at once, with stupefying suddenness and 
inhuman violence, this happy, Christian, monarchical 
France began cursing both priests and kings; she 
bowed down before a new goddess with all the devotion 
which she had formerly lavished upon her old guides 
whom she would now exterminate — ''Cette idole 
nouvelle, c'est ce qu'on nomma fort justement la 
Revolution." ^ 

It might at first sight seem hardly necessary to 
reckon seriously with the opinions of a hopelessly 
reactionary royalist who received his earliest impres- 
1 La France Revolutionnaire, 1 789-1889 (Paris, 1889), p. i. 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 197 

sions under Charles X. But M. d'Hericault is only 
one of a group of really important and scholarly 
writers who, in the interests of reaction, have devoted 
themselves to picturing the horrors and anarchy of 
the Reign of Terror. Moreover, the existence of this 
class of historians can alone explain the attitude of the 
exalted Republicans, who by no means consent to pass 
over the utterances of their inveterate enemies in silent 
contempt. 

When the present municipal government of Paris 
subsidizes historical investigation, it is influenced by 
something more than scientific interest or even ordi- 
nary civic pride. The acts of the Commune during 
the Revolution have been collected and published with 
a view of estabhshing '^the immortal glory of Paris" 
in forwarding "the emancipation of humanity." 
They show, it is claimed, how the representatives of 
Paris founded a new order based on liberty and equal- 
ity, '^ opposing virtue, patriotism, and self-abnegation 
to the treason, perfidy, and calumny which the selfish- 
ness of the aristocrats never ceased to foment against 
those noble citizens of whom they might make martyrs, 
but never renegades." ^ When one calmly considers 
the role of the Paris Commune in the establishing of 
the first French republic, such sentiments appear quite 
as absurdly apologetic as M. d'Hericault 's picture of 
the feHcity of the Ancien Regime. 

1 A ctes de la Commune de Paris, edited for the city by Lacroix, I, 
p. i (1894). 



198 THE NEW HISTORY 

In short, Frenchmen still either love or hate the Revo- 
lution as did their forefathers in 1 790. A French writer 
has very recently declared that ^'the idea of treating 
the Revolution as an event analogous to other events, 
without either curses or apologies, has as yet never 
occurred to any one." ^ This is certainly unfair, but 
it is far nearer the truth than Aulard's claim that he 
and his band treat the history of the Revolution in the 
same spirit in which they might deal with that of 
Greece or Rome. It will be a long time before French- 
men will speak of Dan ton, Anacharsis Cloots, Lafay- 
ette, and Desmoulins in the same disengaged spirit in 
which they might of Cleon, Brasidas, Nicias, and Aris- 
tophanes. 

Partisan enthusiasm continues to be perpetuated in 
many important works and must still be reckoned with 
as it had to be reckoned with a hundred years ago. In 
this respect the Revolution bears out the observation 
of Tocqueville that, although political in its nature, it 
proceeded in the manner of a religious revolution, for 
it stirred up animosities which in their inveterate bit- 
terness rank with the hateful emotions that have ac- 

^ T. Cerfberr, Essai sur le Mouvement Social et I ntellectiiel en France 
depuis I78g{ Paris, 1902), p 113. Aulard sadly comments on Cerfberr's 
harsh judgment: "C'est etrangement meconnaitre tout ce que mes 
amis et moi, depuis bient6t vingt ans, avons ecrit professe, sans eclat 
et sans talent, je le veux bien, mais en proclamant tres haut et en pour- 
suivant sans relache le dessein d'etudier I'histoire de la Revolution 
*sans anatheme comme sans apologie.'" — La Revolution Franqaisey 
Vol. XLH, p. 475. 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" jg^ 

companied religious changes. The explanation of this 
perpetual partisanship is to be sought partly in the 
French temperament, but chieiiy in the fact that 
the Revolution did not succeed in settling some of the 
most important questions that it raised, notably the 
nature of the central government and the relations 
between Church and State. Then, the successive 
constitutional revolutions, although by no means so 
fundamental as commonly supposed, have served to 
raise the spirits of each party in turn and so to per- 
petuate hopes in the breasts of the most radical as 
well as the most conservative. Consequently the 
first Revolution forms the background of every 
debate upon current issues, and the Principles of 
1789 are appealed to with interpretations varying 
with the taste, purposes, and convictions of each par- 
ticular orator who invokes them. 

The French Revolution is perhaps the most diffi- 
cult theme that a historian can select. One who at- 
tempts to treat it, encounters every obstacle and pitfall 
that besets the path of those that endeavor to make 
the present understand the past. There is much doubt 
as to where the Revolution began, and as to when it 
ceased, if it has yet come to an end. There is a bewil- 
dering mass of sources in regard to certain matters, 
and few or no sources for others. Every form of 
violent partisanship -religious, political, social 
and philosophical -must constantly be considered' 
Every one took a hand - kings, foreign and domestic' 



200 THE NEW HISTORY 

courtiers, national assemblies and their innumerable 
committees, local revolutionary bodies, communes, 
deputies on mission, emigres, priests juring and non- 
juring, clubs, orators, newspaper editors, pamphlet- 
eers—and to each of these active forces must be 
assigned its proper influence on the course of affairs. 
Finally, on no occasion in recorded history were so 
many changes effected or suggested, in so many fields 
of human interest, in so short a time, as m France 
during the ten or fifteen years following the convemng 
of the Estates General in 1789- The most radical 
political, social, economic, religious, and educational 
reforms were associated with unprecedented popular 
excitement and disorder, with foreign and civil war, 
national defense, aggression and diplomacy, to such a 
degree as to render any coherent treatment of the 
whole range of events practically impossible. As 
Carlyle said long ago, the words - Erench Revolution 
may ^' have as many meanings. a^ there are speake.rs_of 
theni." To him it meant ' ' the open, violent rebellion 
and victory of disimprisoned anarchy against cor- 
rupt, worn-out authority ; how anarchy breaks prison, 
bursts up from the infinite deep, and rages uncontrol- 
lable, immeasurable, enveloping a world in phasis 
after phasis of fever-frenzy." By Taine the Revolu- 
tion is likened to the disorders produced m a gentle- 
man ''rather weak in constitution but apparently 
sound and of peaceful habits, who drinks eagerly of a 
new liquor, falls suddenly to the ground, foaming at 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 201 

the mouth, delirious and convulsed." Neither Carlyle 
nor Taine took his imagery so seriously as to miss some 
of the deeper significance of the Revolution; but 
weaker heads than theirs have been completely bewil- 
dered by the loud talk and disorder of the period, which 
they have mistaken for the Revolution itself. One of 
the most striking achievements of the last quarter of 
a century is the relegation of the Reign of Terror to its 
proper place. The English-reading public has Pro- 
fessor Morse Stephens in especial to thank for ex- 
plaining and reducing to its proper proportions the 
'^disimprisoned anarchy," which indeed seems almost 
trivial when compared with the magnificent turmoil 
in Russia in recent years. 

The merely personal has always been conspicuous 
in the histories of the Revolution. Marie Antoinette, 
the Princess de Lamballe, Marat, Charlotte Corday, 
Desmoulins, Danton, Saint-Just, the poor little 
dauphin — these have been dear to the hearts of 
readers whose interest was much more readily enlisted 
in the storming of the Bastille or the September 
massacres than in the origin of France's first constitu- 
tion and the principles underlying it. 

It is high time that we had a general account of 
the Revolution regarded simply and solely in its most 
fundamental aspects as a reformation, social, political, 
and economic. This is what Chassin evidently had 
in mind when he began his never completed Genius 
of the Revolution. He dreamed of an histoire posi- 



202 THE NEW HISTORY 

the, in which the personal, anecdotal, transient, and 
fantastic should give way to the permanent achieve- 
ments of the time.^ By the term "Revolution" 
Chassin understood not the upbubbling of ''disim- 
prisoned anarchy," but quite prosaically the way in 
which the reformers transformed their ideas into acts: 
how they substituted for a poHty based upon privilege, 
the regime of equality ; for despotism, a free state ; for 
divine right, the sovereignty of the people ; for favor, 
justice. Assuredly, as Chassin ventured to think, 
''cette histoire ne gagnerait-elle pas en certitude ce qu' 
au premier aspect elle semblerait perdre en interet." 
But why offer apologies ? We long to know just 
what was actually accomplished. In order to learn, 
however, what was done and so appreciate properly the 
place of the Revolution among the great transforma- 
tions of history, it will be necessary to bring the his- 
tory of France from 1789 to 1800 into organic relation 
not only with the Ancien Regime, but with the develop- 
ments throughout western Europe of the half century 
immediately preceding the assembling of the Estates 
General. The older writers tended to give prefer- 
ence, in their study of the Ancien Regime, to the spec- 
tacular abuses and the eccentricities of speculation, 
which may indeed serve to explain the attitude of 
some of the more fantastic terrorists, but which will 
never account for the seemingly abrupt and permanent 

1 Le Genie de la Revolution (1864-1865), introduction. Only the 
first two volumes, on the cahiers of 1789, ever appeared. 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 203 

betterment. This must remain a mystery to those 
who have not traced the more or less abortive reforms 
and the irresistible demands for improvement which 
lie back of the Principles of lySg. The Revolution 
will some day be recognized as the most decisive and 
general readjustment to meet new and altered condi- 
tions of which we have any record. To tell the story 
of this rebirth, not only in France but in western 
Europe, with scrupulous attention to the process of 
gestation, is an aspiration which, it is to be hoped, will 
dominate those who deal with this subject in the future. 

So few writers have as yet set before themselves 
quite clearly the problem of discovering and explain- 
ing the really great and permanent results of the 
Revolution, that the public may be forgiven for 
scarcely suspecting that there have been such results. 
One exception must certainly be made. M. Aulard 
undertakes a definite task in his Political History of 
the French Revolution and has chosen what he regards as 
the two most essential principles of the movement — 
equality of rights and popular sovereignty — and has 
devoted his unswerving attention and vast knowl- 
edge to narrating the vicissitudes which these two 
principles underwent from 1789 to 1804. As one reads 
his book it seems as if one had escaped from wild 
delirium into a realm of tolerably coherent and intel- 
ligible thought and purpose. 

Underlying the dramatic episodes of the Revolu- 
tion, and obscured by them, is a story of fundamental 



204 THE NEW HISTORY 

social and political reform which not only serves to 
explain the history of France during the nineteenth 
century, but casts much light as well upon the progress 
of liberal institutions in Europe at large. If we im- 
agine some sober-minded student of the future look- 
ing back five hundred years hence upon the French 
Revolution, it may well be that to him its romantic 
episodes will so far have sunk into the background 
that its real contributions to European institutions 
will be apparent. Among the achievements to which 
our remote observer will assign an important place 
will be what are known in France as ''the Principles 
of 1789." 

Ever since Burke denounced the first French National 
Assembly and the ''clumsy subtility of their political 
metaphysics," which, like yEolus's winds, threatened 
to "sweep the earth with their hurricane," there has 
been a marked tendency upon the part of English 
and German historians to condemn the Declaration 
of the Rights of Man as an instance of Gallic light- 
headedness. Sybel thinks that the terrible crisis 
which confronted France in the following years may 
clearly be seen in its provisions, and almost all writers 
agree that much valuable time that should have been 
devoted to urgent concrete reforms was wasted in 
empty scholastic disputation. Frenchmen have in 
some cases condemned the Declaration from the stand- 
point of political expediency as harshly as foreign 
critics. On the other hand, the Declaration not only 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 205 

aroused general enthusiasm when first published, 
but appeared over and over again, in a modified form, 
in succeeding French constitutions down to 1848, and 
has been the model for similar declarations in many of 
the constitutions of the other continental states. 

In the attempts to explain the origin and discover 
the archetypes of the Declaration of Rights there 
have been two main tendencies : the one, to lay the 
responsibility at the door of Rousseau; the other, 
to recall precedents in the United States, to which 
reference is often made, though most vaguely, in the 
debates of the National Assembly. Sybel believes 
that our Declaration of Independence suggested the 
idea to the French. Hausser and Stephens discover 
a model in a mythical declaration of rights which, 
they assume, is prefixed to our federal constitution.^ 

The purpose of the present paper is to show how 
gradually the idea of a constitution developed in 
France, and how natural it was to preface her first 
written constitution by a brief statement of the general 
principles upon which it was founded. It is assuredly 
high time that we should cease to study the conduct 
of France^s first modern legislative body with the 

1 These distinguished historians differ as to the nature of our fed- 
eral bill of rights. Hausser asserts that it is expressed in knappen 
laconischen Worten {Gesch. d. Fr. Rev., p. 169), while, according to 
Professor H. Morse Stephens, all the deputies who admired the Ameri- 
can constitution said " that no respectable constitution could pos- 
sibly be drawn up without an elaborate [ ! ] declaration prefixed to 
it." — Hist, of the Fr. Rev., American edition, I, p. 165. 



206 THE NEW HISTORY 

main aim of finding explanations for the Reign of 
Terror. Let us endeavor, instead, to see their task 
as it appeared to the deputies and to their constit- 
uents. In order to do this we must review the cir- 
cumstances under which the National Assembly 
first announced its intention of drawing up a consti- 
tution. 

II 

Every one knows that early in May of 1789 the 
ancient feudal assembly of three orders known as the 
Estates General assembled in Versailles after an inter- 
val of a hundred and seventy-five years. In spite 
of the studiously antiquated dress prescribed for its 
members, the body was found to have undergone a 
very significant change since last it met. No royal 
edict could recreate the spirit of earlier centuries. 
The inevitable metamorphosis into a modern repre- 
sentative assembly took place during the succeeding 
weeks, notwithstanding the opposition of the conserv- 
ative elements. 

The intriguing courtiers about the king were quick 
to realize this dangerous tendency and induced 
Louis XVI to suspend the sessions of the three orders 
on the excuse that he proposed to hold a royal session 
on June 22, and that it was necessary to set the car- 
penters to work to prepare the hall for this solemn 
occasion. 

On finding the usual place of assembly occupied by the 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 207 

workmen, the representatives of the third estate 
gathered in the Tennis Court of Versailles and adopted 
the following resolution : — 

The National Assembly, regarding itself as called upon to 
establish the constitution of the kingdom, effect a regeneration 
of the state {Vordre public) and maintain the true principles of 
monarchy, may not be prevented from continuing its delibera- 
tions in whatever place it may be forced to take up its sittings. 
Maintaining further, that wherever its members are assembled, 
there is the Nadonal Assembly, the assembly decrees that all its 
members shall immediately take a solemn oath never to separate, 
and to come together wherever circumstances may dictate, until 
the constitution of the kingdom shall be established and placed 
upon a firm foundation. 

The importance of this resolution lies in the fact 
that it was the first distinct and formal assertion 
of the assembly's mission. 

The usual accounts of the French Revolution are 
apt to give the impression that this famous oath was 
the unpremeditated outcome of an invasion of car- 
penters, — of ''hammering, sawing, and operative 
screeching," as Carlyle says; but as a matter of fact 
the oath of June 20 constituted in reality only a slight, 
although politically important, advance beyond the 
state of affairs before the deputies found themselves 
excluded from their meeting place. 

A resolution had been passed three days before 
(June 17) by which the deputies of the third estate 
had assumed the title of "National Assembly." 
The deputies had, moreover, taken an oath upon this 



2o8 THE NEW HISTORY 

same seventeenth of June very like the Tennis Court 
oath itself : ''We swear and pledge ourselves to fulfill 
with zeal and fideUty the duties which devolve upon 
us." "This oath," we are told, ''taken by six hun- 
dred members, surrounded by four thousand specta- 
tors (the public having gathered in crowds at this 
session), excited the greatest emotion, and constituted 
a most imposing spectacle." Apparently all that was 
novel in the Tennis Court oath is the clear announce- 
ment that the establishment of a constitution is the 
essential task of the assembly. 

The unanimous recognition on the part of the depu- 
ties that the true object of the assembly was the 
drafting of a constitution is quite sufhcient to prove 
that the public mind was ripe for this declaration. 
By what steps had the French nation attained to a 
clear conviction that the salvation of the country 
depended upon the distinct formulation of the prin- 
ciples of government — a conviction which received 
its first official announcement in the Tennis Court 
oath? 

The motives advanced by the king and his ministers 
for convoking the Estates General had been but 
vaguely conceived, and therefore but vaguely indicated, 
in the Letter of Summons, of January 24, 1789. "We 
have," the document relates, "need of the counsel 
of our faithful subjects to aid us in overcoming all the 
difficulties in which we are involved respecting the 
state of our finances, and to establish according to 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 209 

our wishes a constant and invariable order in the 
various parts of the government which affect the hap- 
piness of our subjects and the prosperity of our king- 
dom." The phrase ''fixed and constant order in all 
parts of the administration" occurs three times in 
this brief document as one of the great objects 
which the Estates General, in conjunction with the 
king, are expected to accomplish. The report which 
Necker, then in charge of the finances, made to the 
king, a month previous to the actual summoning of 
the estates, although claiming to reflect the inmost 
purposes of the monarch, really does little to define 
the vague terms used in the letter of convocation 
itself. Necker says nothing of a constitution, but 
seems to take for granted that the Estates General 
are to be regularly and periodically convened in the 
future, and that the worst abuses are to be done away 
with and the administration improved. No further 
program was furnished by the government until the 
king submitted an elaborate and interesting plan 
of reform in thirty-five articles at the royal session, 
three days after the Tennis Court oath. 

The ideas of reform vaguely advanced by the govern- 
ment had taken a much more definite shape, however, 
in the minds of the leading spirits in the nation at 
large, and had developed into the matured concep- 
tion of a constitution some time before the assembling 
of the Estates General. A remarkable forecast of 
the ideas which later became the basis of constitu- 



210 THE NEW HISTORY 

tional revolution is to be found in the " protests " of the 
parlements issued from time to time during the eight- 
eenth century. These superior courts of France had 
formulated the theory of a constitution long before 
the Revolution, and had, moreover, taken great pains 
to familiarize the public with the idea. 

Considering the inherently close connection between 
the legislative and the judicial functions of govern- 
ment, it is not strange that a proud and self-conscious 
body Kke the parlement of Paris should have been 
inclined to define its duties broadly and extend its 
influence so as to exercise a certain control over the 
formation of the law. This tendency was rendered 
almost inevitable by a custom which had long existed 
of permitting the courts to protest against, and demand 
a reconsideration of, kingly edicts when presented to 
them for registration. This anomalous right of par- 
ticipation in legislation was stoutly defended by the 
parlements, the arguments advanced being based not 
only upon precedent, but upon justice and expediency 
as well. The attempts of the king and his ministers 
to force the courts to register edicts against their will 
produced serious crises. On these occasions the 
despotic character of the French monarchy and the 
problem of the exact nature of the legislative act were 
brought prominently before the nation. 

In order to support their contingent opposition to 
the wishes of the king, whom they recognized freely 
enough as the supreme lawgiver, the courts put for- 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 211 

ward the theory of a constitution. They assume the 
guardianship of the '^fundamental laws" of the mon- 
archy. It devolves upon them, they claim, to main- 
tain the constitution of the kingdom and to see that 
no fundamental maxims are violated. This consti- 
tution was perhaps ill-defined, and was comprised 
in no accepted written code ; nevertheless, the courts 
very properly pointed out that it was only by contin- 
uing to observe certain venerable usages that France 
could be said to enjoy a regular legal government at 
all. As they once bluntly told Louis XV: "Adula- 
tion itself would not dare to assert that in every case 
anything that the king wills becomes forthwith a law 
of the monarchy." ^ The parlements appear to have 
been conscious, however, that their claims rested at 
best upon a somewhat precarious foundation. They 
never venture to give a complete or even extended 
enumeration of the '' fundamental laws" of the mon- 
archy. For the vagueness of their pretensions they 
seek to compensate by solemn reiteration.^ 

Notwithstanding the obvious want of definiteness 
in the theories of the parlements, there is much in the 
widely circulated protests, beginning with that of 
May, 1 7 16, which could not but leave a deep impres- 
sion upon a public that was becoming more and more 

^ Protest of the Parlement of Brittany, July, 1771. 

2 "Le Parlement sent bien la fragilite des droits qu'il reclame et 11 
deguise la faiblesse de ses pretentions sous des affirmations vagues qu'il 
developpe dans un langage solennel." Flammermont, Remontrances 
du Parlement de Paris au XV II I e Steele, I, p. xxxi. 



212 THE NEW HISTORY 

conscious of the abuses and dangers of absolutism. 
The nature of successive conflicts between the superior 
courts and the king's ministers, important as they 
were in cultivating a spirit of general discontent, can- 
not be considered here. We must confine ourselves 
to the stimulus given by the parlements to the grow- 
ing demands in the eighteenth century for a limita- 
tion of the king's powers. 

The following statement of the parlements^ case, 
made some seventy years before the Tennis Court 
oath, contains a summary of the claims which are 
separately developed at greater length in the various 
manifestoes of those bodies : — 

While we recognize, Sire, that you alone are lord and master 
and the sole lawgiver, and that there are laws which varying 
times, the needs of your people, the maintenance of order, and 
the administration of your kingdom may oblige you to change, 
substituting new ones according to the forms always observed 
in this state, we nevertheless believe it to be our duty to call 
to your attention the existence of laws as old as the monarchy, 
which are permanent and invariable, the guardianship of which 
was committed to you along with the crown itself. ... It is by 
reason of the permanence of such laws that we have you as lord 
and master. It is this permanence which leads us to hope that 
the crown, having rested upon your head during a long, just, 
and glorious reign, will pass to your posterity for aU time to 
come. 

In recent times it has been clearly shown how much France 
owes to the maintenance of these original laws of the state, and 
how important it is in the service of your Majesty that your 
parlement, which is responsible to you and to the nation for their 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 213 

exact observation, should assiduously guard against any attack 
upon them.^ 

Even Louis XIV, the parlement claims, had regarded 
that body as ''the real guardian of the fundamental 
laws of the kingdom, and even the most absolute of 
the kings had accepted the registration by the parle- 
ment as a necessary condition for the enactment of 
a law." 2 

The superior tribunals, especially the parlement of 
Paris, are thus placed upon the same footing as the 
monarch himself. They both exist in virtue of the 
same fundamental or constitutional laws. Thus, 
''la constitution la plus essentielle et la plus sacree 
de la monarchic,"^ as conceived by the magistrates, 
provided not only for a king with "fortunate inabili- 
ties,"^ but for tribunals which had a right to cooper- 
ate in legislation.^ Both owed their existence to the 

* Iterathes Remontrances siir la Refonte des M annates, July 26, 1718. 
Flammermont's collection, I, pp. 88 S., especially pp. 94, 95. 

2 Ibid., pp. 95, 96. 

2 Remontrance of June 18, 1763, p. 16. 

^ " Bienheureuse impuissance," a constantly recurring quotation 
from the Droits de la Reine stir divers Etats de la Monarchic dc VEspagne- 
supposed to have been inspired by Louis XIV. 

^ "Que toute administration dans I'etat est fondee sur des Loix, et 
qu'il n'en est aucune sans un enregistrement libre, precede de verifica, 
tion et d'examen, que cette verification est necessaire pour donner a 
toutes les Loix ce caractere d'authenticite, auquel les peuples recon- 
noissent I'autorite qui doit les conduire," etc. Extrait des registres du 
Parlement, January 2, 1760, p. 13. See also Remontrance of June 18, 
1763, passim. 



214 THE NEW HISTORY 

same imprescriptible law by which the kings themselves 
were kings. ^ 

The so-called Grandes Remontrances of 1753 dis- 
cuss at length the relation of the will of the sover- 
eign to the law of the land. The subjection of the 
kingly will to law is clearly set forth, and the theory 
is supported by a variety of somewhat startling quo- 
tations culled from the political literature of Louis 
XIV's reign.2 This remonstrance of 1753, dealing 
with the refusal of the sacraments, closes the long 
struggle growing out of the bull Unigenitus. The 
succeeding conflicts between parlements and ministry 
turn on other matters. The popularity-loving magis- 
trates, susceptible to the spirit of the times, learn to 

1 The Parlement asserts, in a protest of June 18, 1763 : "Que de 
meme que le souverain est I'auteur et le protecteur des Loix, de meme 
les Loix sont la base et les garants de I'autorite du Souverain ; et que 
toute atteinte portee aux Loix retombe plus ou moins directement sur 
le Souverain lui-meme. Que meconnoitre I'existence ou la force irre- 
fragable des Loix immuables par leur nature, constitutives de I'economie 
de I'etat, ce seroit ebranler la solidite du Trone meme. Que suivant 
les expressions du Premier President de son Parlement, parlant a I'un 
des augustes Predecesseurs dudit Seigneur Roi, 'les Loix de I'etat et du 
Royaume ne peuvent etres violees sans revoquer en dout la Puissance 
meme et la Souverainete dudit Seigneur Roi. Que nous avons deux 
sortes de loix ; les unes sont les Ordonnances des Rois, qui se peuvent 
changer selon la diversite des temps et des affaires ; les autres sont les 
Ordonnances du Royaume, qui sont inviolables, et par lesquelles ledit 
Seigneur Roi est monte au Tr6ne royal, et cette Couronne a ete con- 
servee par ses predecesseurs jusqu'a lui.'" This last quotation the 
court derived from a speech made by Harlai before the king, June 15, 
1586. 

^ Flammermont, I, pp. 521 ff. 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 215 

give a democratic or, at least, a popular, tone to their 
declarations. The terms ^'nation," ''people," and 
citoyen occur more and more frequently in the expostu- 
lations with the king. We can easily perceive the 
growing antagonism of the nation towards an unlimited 
or ill-defined royal power. The clearest and most ma- 
ture statement of the theory of a constitution which 
I have found occurs in an obscure remonstrance ad- 
dressed to the king by the parlement of Brittany, 
dated July, im'- — 

There is an essential difference between the transitory regu- 
lations which vary with the times, and the fundamental laws 
upon which the constitution of the monarchy rests. In respect 
to the former [that is, the transitory regulations], it is the duty 
of the courts to influence and enUghten the ruUng power, al- 
though their opinions must, in the last instance, yield to the 
decisions of your wisdom, since it appertains to you alone to 
regulate everything relating to the administration. To admm- 
ister the state is not, however, to change its constitution. . . . 
It is therefore, most indispensable to distinguish and to except 
the cases where the right of expostulation suffices to enlighten 
the ruling power in an administration which, in spite of its wide 
scope, still has its limits, and those cases where the happy in- 
ability [of the monarch] to overstep the bounds established by 
the constitution implies the power necessary legally to oppose 
what an arbitrary will cannot and may not do. 
While this is obviously an ex parte argument with a 
view to justifying the pretensions of the courts, it is 
a remarkable approximation to the later ideas of a 
constitution as distinguished from current statutory 
legislation. Not only was the word "constitution'^ 



2l6 THE NEW HISTORY 

familiar to the thoughtful Frenchman many years 
before the Revolution, but the idea which underlies 
the modern conception of a constitutional government 
was ready at hand. 

That the superior courts represented the nation 
since the discontinuance of the Estates General was 
perhaps the basis of the claim which the parlements 
ventured to make upon the sympathy of the public.^ 
It was the parlement of Paris which, on July i6, 1787, 
requested that the Estates General be again convoked, 
"m view of the fact that the Nation, represented by the 
Estates General, alone has a right to grant the king the 
necessary subsidies.''^ This demand, passed by a 
strange coaHtion of radicals and conservatives, who 
held opposite views of the meaning of their action, 
was the beginning of the end. 

Doubtless our own early state constitutions may 
have served to clarify the ideas of some of their more 
thoughtful readers in France. The earliest collection 
of these, published in 1778, was prepared for French 
readers. Another edition of two hundred copies, exacts 
et corrects, appears to have been dispatched to France 
somewhat later, by order of Congress.^ Turgot, 

^ "Ce peuple avoit autrefois la consolation de presenter ses dole- 
ances aux Rois vos predecesseurs ; mais depuis un siecle et un demi les 
6tats n'ont point ete convoques. Jusqu'a ce jour au moins la reclama- 
tion des Cours suppleoit a celle des etats, quoiqu'imparfaitement." 
Remontrances de la Cour des Aides, February i8, 1771. 

^ Professor James Shotwell has called my attention to a curious 
review of this official collection in Yxexon'sAnnee Litter air e^ VH, p. 107 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 217 

Mably, Condorcet, and others published comments 
upon our institutions. There can, I think, be no 
doubt that the hazy allusions which we find in the 
debates of the National Assembly to the Declarations 
of Rights in America have no reference to our federal 
constitution,! nor, ordinarily, to the Declaration of 
Independence, but to the elaborate bills of rights which 
precede some of our early state constitutions, notably 
those of Massachusetts and Virginia. 

The experience of the United States may well have 
added somewhat to the precision and vigor of an 
already well-developed movement towards constitu- 
tional reform; more weight than this cannot safely 
be ascribed to American example. It is in the condi- 
tions and course of events in France, not in foreign 
influence, that the true explanation is to be found 
of the demand for a written guaranty of their rights 

curiot^ Ji" I'F™ °' ^""Sress "a e«, sans doute, de sadsfaire la juste 
cunosite de I Europe,^ en lu, faisant connaitre sous quel caractSre et 
avee quels ftres les Etats-Unis vont paraitre sur la sc^ne du monde 
Nous ne doutons pas que cela ne soit accueilli avec empressement 
surtout par la France, qui a si bien aide I'Amerique i enfanter la R6- 
pubhque nouvelle Ce n'est pas que nous adoptons toutes les idees- 
nous sonnnes s, hbres sous des monarques cheris, que dans le temps 
meme ou nous fehatons nos amis de jouer d'une liberie qui est plu 

envie. While the Declaration of Independence is pronounced the 
redTCl'"— ' ''' --'-'- - ^-'chusetts it 
a s^rl o'f Ml T -7^*"™" °' "" ^'^''^^ constitution, which form 
after the final formulation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man 



2l8 THE NEW HISTORY 

made by all classes of Frenchmen in 1 788-1 789. In 
the period of excitement accompanying the attempt 
of a hampered and incensed ministry to destroy the 
old tribunals in May, 1788, the Parlement of Paris 
ventured to formulate the principles of the constitu- 
tion in more detail than ever before. Among the 
fundamental laws were ^'the right of the nation 
freely to grant subsidies through the Estates General'* 
and the right of every citizen never to be arrested 
except to be sent immediately before competent judges. 
These propositions suggest two of the "rights" of 
man and the citizen as later sanctioned by the As- 
sembly. With these propositions were associated a 
number of others which aimed to estabhsh the consti- 
tutional inability of the king and his ministers to 
abolish the parlements, whose prerogative it was "to 
examine in each province the volontes of the king and 
order the registration of such as were in agreement 
with the constitutional laws (lots constitutives) of the 
particular province, as well as with the fundamental 
laws of the state." 

This appeal of the parlement of Paris to provincial 
particularism, although in a certain sense an absurd 
anachronism, was for the moment successful. The 
ministry had lost every vestige of public sympathy 
since Calonne's financial revelations of the year be- 
fore, and the effort to abolish the local parlements 
caused a number of serious revolts in the provinces. 
That in Dauphine not only precipitated the assem- 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 219 

bling of the Estates General, but exercised a most 
important influence upon their spirit and character. 

Now, this crisis of 1788 is an integral part of the 
movement of the French Revolution. Although 
upon the surface the opponents of the ministry were 
merely defending outworn provincial privileges, which 
a year later were to be done away with forever, the 
struggle, at bottom, was against absolutism as such. 
It was plain that not only were there numberless 
abuses to be remedied, but also that the king's arbi- 
trary powers must be limited at all cost ; for had not 
the ministers just modified the whole organization of 
the state by abolishing, by royal ordinance, in a most 
underhand manner, the last remnants of public or 
semi-public control ? The defense of provincial rights 
came first, but the issue was really national. 

Ill 

As was most natural, the determination of the king 
to summon the Estates General called forth a great 
number of pamphlets, especially in the latter half of 
the year 1788. These corresponded in function to the 
modern newspaper editorial, which very quickly devel- 
oped from them. While they dealt mainly with the 
question of the number of representatives and with 
the method of voting in the assembly, some took up 
the work which the Estates General had before it. 
That of Sieyes is well known, and its author occupied an 



220 THE NEW HISTORY 

authoritative position in the Assembly from the first. 
A less known pamphlet, published anonymously, but 
attributed with good reason to Rabaut St. Etienne, 
the most radical perhaps of the more influential speak- 
ers in the Assembly before June 20, appeared a year 
before the Tennis Court Oath, and set forth the neces- 
sity of estabhshing a constitution. 

So long as the changing and arbitrary form of your admin- 
istration continues to exist [the author urges], so long will the 
ministers to whom your interests are temporarily confided be in 
a position to overturn the established order, modify or abrogate 
the laws and regulations made by their predecessors, while all 
your efforts to correct the abuses and better your situation will 
be futile and without permanent results. ^ 

In determining the principles of a good constitution, 
while the author speaks of those of Switzerland and 
of the United States, he evidently recognizes that 
England, after all, furnishes the most feasible model. 
The constitution ought, he holds, to provide for two 
houses of legislation, a separation of the powers of 
government, ministerial responsibihty, security of 
person and property, and liberty of the press, etc., — 
a complete program, extracted in a measure no doubt 
from Montesquieu. So far, however, as I have exam- 
ined the pamphlets of the times, the one just described 
seems to be exceptional. AsSorelsays: ''The French 

^ A la Nation Franqoise, sur les Vices de son Gouvernement, sur la 
Necessite d'etablir une Constitution et sur la Composition des Etats- 
Generaux. Archives Parlementaires, Vol. I , pp . 5 7 2-5 73 . 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 221 

were much more anxious for civil than for poHtical 
liberty." We find a great deal more discussion of 
financial oppression and of the existing social and eco- 
nomic abuses than of a proposed political or constitu- 
tional reorganization. 

The same tendency is apparent in the cahiers, the 
lists of grievances and suggestions for reform, drawn 
up according to an ancient custom by the nobihty 
and clergy of each electoral district and by the com- 
moners in town and country. These indicate a very 
general, if not practically universal, desire that the 
despotic government of the Bourbons should cease. 
To take an example at random from one of the cahiers 
of the clergy, we find in Article i, this statement : '' The 
fundamental [constitutives] laws of the nation ought not 
to be based upon doubtful and obscure traditions, but 
estabHshed upon a solid foundation, to wit, justice 
and the good of the people." Nothing is to be done 
in the assembly of the Estates General, the cahier 
declares, *' until the rights of the nation are solemnly 
recognized and determined. A charter containing 
these shall be drawn up, in which they shall be formally 
and irrevocably inscribed." ^ This is characteristi- 
cally vague, and, taking the orders throughout, repre- 
sents the average minimum demand. Every one 
seemed to feel that the desired civil rights and free- 
dom could only be secured by establishing so much of a 
constitution as would insure the periodic meetings of 

^ Senechaussee de Mans. Archives Parlementaire, III, p. 637. 



222 THE NEW HISTORY 

the Estates General. This regular participation of 
the nation in the exercise of legislative power would 
prevent oppression, if the rights of the individual were 
once defined and solemnly and irrevocably reduced to 
writing. Such a course was not regarded as implying 
any radical innovations. In fact, in the case of some 
of the cahiers of the nobility, the desire appears to have 
been to secure their own special privileges, which they 
regarded as '^fundamental laws." These, if reduced 
to writing, were, it was argued, not so likely to be 
questioned in the future as they had been of recent 
years. Taine's assertion that the nobility in general 
held, with Montesquieu, that France already had a 
constitution, is not, however, borne out by the cahiers} 
although there are some instances which give counte- 
nance to this view. 

The general desire for some security for the mainte- 
nance of the fundamental rights of person and prop- 
erty takes a more definite form in certain \xrh2incahiers ; 
for example, in that of the senechaussee of Lyons : — 

Since arbitrary power has been the source of all the evils 
which afflict the State, our first desire is the establishment of a 
really national constitution, which shall define the rights of all 
and provide the laws to maintain them. Consequently our 
representatives shall request the Estates General to decree, and 
His Majesty to sanction, a strictly constitutional law, the chief 
aims of which shall be as follows : [a list of fourteen articles are 
enumerated, concluding with the provision that] since in no 

^ This is pointed out by Champion in his introduction to his 
edition of Sieyes's pamphlet, p. ix, note. 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 223 

society can any happiness be hoped for without a good constitu- 
tion, the Province of the Lyonnais recommends its deputies 
to discuss no other subject until the French constitution shall be 
fixed by the Estates General. ^ 

We note in the cahiers a perfectly natural and un- 
conscious confusion, or rather fusion, of two quite 
different demands, that for '^une regie invariable dans 
toutes les parties de Tadministration et de I'ordre 
public,"^ and that for ^'une charte fran^aise qui as- 
surera pour jamais les droits du Roi et de la nation." ^ 
This expression, "rights of the nation," appears fre- 
quently, sometimes with the correlative "rights of 
the king." But national rights rested after all upon an 
uncertain historical basis. Should not the recurrence 
of abuses and the insidious encroachments of tyranny 
be forever precluded by an appeal to the inalienable 
rights of each and every member of society ? If these 
and "the principles of the social contract" were clearly 
and solemnly proclaimed, they would, it was hoped, 
become the basis of the French government. The 
nobility of Mantes and Meulan went a step further : 
"political principles should," they claimed, "be as ab- 
solute as those of morality" ; they asked consequently 
for a "declaration of rights, that is to say, an act by 
which the representatives of the nation shall pro- 
claim in its name the rights which belong to all men 

1 Archives Parlementaire, III, pp. 608-609. 

2 Third Estate of Beauvais, Archives Parlementaires, II, p. 279. 
^ Clergy of Caen, Archives Parlementaires, II, p. 486. 



224 THE NEW HISTORY 

in their quality of reasonable, intelligent beings, ca- 
pable of moral ideas — rights anterior to any social 
institutions [ ! ]." ^ 

Nowhere is this anxiety for a separate proclamation 
of man's natural pohtical immunities clearer than in 
the cahier of the third estate of Nemours, which re- 
quested the king to draw up a '^declaration " so soon as 
the Estates General should have set forth the natural 
and social rights of man and the citizen. This declara- 
tion was to be registered in all the courts, published 
several times a year in all the churches, and inserted 
in all the books destined for the earliest childhood. 
No one should be admitted to any judicial or admin- 
istrative office without having repeated the declaration 
from memory. This cahier, moreover, furnishes an 
elaborate draft of such a bill of rights, as do a number 
of others, including the cahier of Paris intra muros. 

This last was drawn up later than the rest, not being 
completed until after May 5, the day upon which the 
Estates General met. The committee appointed to 
draft the cahier included a number of distinguished 
men, and the result of their deliberations is the most 
complete scheme of a constitution which appeared 
before that drawn up in the National Assembly itself. 
The first division of the cahier is devoted to this subject, 
and the representatives of Paris ''are expressly for- 
bidden to consent to any subsidy or loan until the 
declaration of the rights of the nation shall have be- 
* Archives Parlementaires, Vol. HI, p. 661. 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 225 

come a law, and the foundations of a constitution are 
agreed upon and assured." The draft of the constitu- 
tion is preceded, Hke that actually decreed later in the 
National Assembly, by a declaration of rights, which 
the cahier claims should *' constitute a national charter 
and form the basis of the French government." No 
other cahier, so far as I have observed, except that of 
Nemours, contains so clear a statement of this char- 
acteristic idea that the declaration of rights is an essen- 
tial element of the constitution. Not only was this 
suggestion accepted by the National Assembly, which, 
as is well known, formulated the "Declaration of the 
Rights of Man and the Citizen" before proceeding to 
the constitution itself, but the clauses themselves, as 
they appear in this cahier of Paris, are strikingly sim- 
ilar to those finally adopted by the assembly. The 
importance of the well-ordered constitutional pro- 
visions suggested in the cahier can best be estimated 
by their close approach to those of the constitution 
of 1 791. Among them are the following : — 

In the French monarchy the legislative power belongs to 
the nation in conjunction with the king. The executive power 
belongs to the king alone. 

The Estates General shall be periodically convoked every 
three years, without, however, excluding extraordinary sessions. 
They shall never adjourn without indicating the day and place 
of their next session. 

Any one convicted of an attempt to prevent the assembling 
of the Estates General shall be declared a traitor to his coun- 
try, guilty of the crime of Vese-nation [sic /]. 
Q 



226 THE NEW HISTORY 

In the intervals between the sessions of the Estates General, 
only provisional regulations may be issued in execution of that 
which has been decreed in the preceding Estates General, nor 
can these regulations be made laws, except in the following 
Estates General. 

Many more examples might be given to illustrate the 
similarity between this sketch and the plan ultimately 
adopted. The cahier claims that 

the constitution which shall be drawn up by the present Estates 
General, according to the principles which have just been set 
forth, shall be the property of the nation, and may not be 
changed or modified except by the constituent power, that is to 
say, by the nation itself, or by its representatives elected ad hoc 
by the whole body of citizens for the single purpose of supple- 
menting or perfecting this constitution. 

The confidence in a declaration of rights is not diffi- 
cult to explain. The French nation at large had no 
idea of the tremendous difficulty of completely re- 
organizing the government upon a new plan. Few, 
if any, foresaw that the constitution would be, when 
completed, a very lengthy legal document. The 
people, while they longed for a fundamental change, 
did not care much about the intricacies of the govern- 
mental system. They wanted, above all, to secure 
their civil liberty; they cared little to participate in 
the government, but were only anxious to control it 
so far as to prevent the revival of old abuses. Two 
or three things were clear to them : The king and his 
ministers were wasting the public funds and had got 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 227 

the state into serious financial straits ; the ministers, 
too, had but recently tried to abolish arbitrarily an 
ancient and, on the whole, popular institution, the 
parlements, so as to consolidate their despotism and 
shake off the last constitutional guaranty; certain 
governmental practices were open and scandalous 
violations of the most obvious rights of humanity; 
and, finally, the general anarchy of the Ancien Regime 
hampered commerce and industry and brought home 
the evils of the situation to thousands who had never 
read a word of Rousseau or seen a single Hne of the 
constitution of Massachusetts. The nobles of La 
Rochelle explained clearly enough the reasons why a 
distinct statement of the fundamental laws and civil 
guaranties was demanded by practically the whole 
nation. 

We behold taxes of all kinds arbitrarily depriving the sub- 
ject of his possessions; privileged monopolies paralyzing ac- 
tivity; lettres de cachet fettering liberty, saving the guilty and 
putting the innocent in chains; commissions suspending the 
laws and turning the courts of justice upside down ; each min- 
ister reversing the arrangements of his predecessors.^ 

In view of these declarations M. Champion is correct 
in his assertion : — 

The classical spirit, the taste for abstractions, a priori sys- 
tems, may have had some influence in the drawing up of certain 
cahiers; but the idea of making a constitution did not come 
from philosophy nor from a noble frenzy ; it was called forth by 

1 Archives Parlementaires, Vol. Ill, p. 472. 



228 THE NEW HISTORY 

the public misfortunes. Had there never been a Social Contract, 
the idea would have been propagated by the force of circum- 
stances. Why impute to mean or evil sentiments a demand 
which is so well explained by the state of the kingdom, which 
had become a veritable chaos ? ^ 

The French, long conscious of the abuses of their 
system of government, and anxious to insure their 
liberties by limiting the prerogatives of their monarch, 
turned their minds naturally and inevitably to a species 
of written guaranty which should give definiteness 
to the chief fundamental laws of the state. The very 
insistence placed upon the declaration of the rights of 
man showed that the people had in view a charter in 
the EngHsh sense of the word rather than an elab- 
orately wrought out constitution, like that of 1791. 
^'No one denies now," Mirabeau once remarked with 
characteristic insight, 2 ^'that the French nation was 
prepared for the revolution which has just taken 
place rather through a consciousness of its ills and the 
faults of its government than by the general advance 
of knowledge. Every one was conscious of what 
should be destroyed; no one knew what should be 
estabhshed." 

IV 

This brief review of the crisis of 1788 and of the 
pubHc spirit shown in the cahiers renders the attitude 

1 La France d'apres les cahiers de lySg, pp. 39-40- 

2 Twenty-third note to the court in correspondence with Lamarck. 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 229 

of the National Assembly perfectly intelligible. The 
Third Estate, on June 17, 1789, proclaimed its mission 
to be the determination of the principles of national 
regeneration. On July 9 its committee on the consti- 
tution made its first report, and an excellent report it 
was. The distinction between a constitution — an 
established system of government — and a declaration 
of rights was carefully laid down. In order to prepare 
a good constitution, the report said, "it is necessary 
to recognize the rights which natural justice grants 
to every individual, and to recall all those principles 
which must form the basis of every kind of society." 
The committee recommended that, in order to keep 
in view the object of the constitution, it should be pre- 
ceded by a declaration of the rights of man, but that 
this should not be issued separately, for fear that its 
provisions might prove too abstract if unaccompanied 
by the concrete provisions of the constitution. 

Thus a declaration of the rights of man was to be 
drawn up in answer to a very general demand. Very 
few, if any, of the deputies deprecated the declaration, 
and on August 4 it was decided, by a practically unani- 
mous vote, that it should precede the constitution. 
There is no need to follow here the somewhat depress- 
ing discussion in regard to its contents. It reached 
its final form on August 26, and had occupied the main 
attention of the Assembly, at different intervals, for 
perhaps a fortnight altogether. Was this time wasted, 
or worse than wasted? Did the deputies lose them- 



230 THE NEW HISTORY 

selves in vague and misleading abstractions and so 
sacrifice the best interests of the nation to mere theories 
and prepare the way for far worse calamities than those 
which they pretended to remedy ? Or, on the other 
hand, were the principles of their declaration upon the 
whole sound, general rather than abstractly theoretical, 
dictated by years of national experience, and well 
fitted to form the program of their great undertaking ? 
Before attempting to answer these questions, let us 
read over once more the declaration itself — it is brief 
and instructive. 

The representatives of the French people, organized as a 
national assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or con- 
tempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public calam- 
ities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to 
set forth in a solemn declaration, the natural, inalienable, and 
sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being con- 
stantly before all the members of the social body, shaU remind 
them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the 
acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive 
power, may be compared at any moment with the ends of all 
political institutions and may thus be more respected; and, 
lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based here- 
after upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the 
maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness 
of all. Therefore, the national assembly recognizes and pro- 
claims in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme 
Being the following rights of man and of the citizen : — 

Article i. Men are born and remain free and equal in 
rights. Social distinctions may only be founded upon the gen- 
eral good. 

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 231 

of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights 
are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. 

3. The essence [principe] of all sovereignty resides essen- 
tially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any 
authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. 

4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which 
injures no one else ; hence the exercise of the natural rights of 
each man has no Umits except those which assure to the other 
members of society the enjoyment of the same rights. These 
limits can only be determined by law. 

5 . Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. 
Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and 
no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law. 

6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen 
has a right to participate personally, or through his representa- 
tive, in its enactment. It must be the same for all, whether it 
protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of 
the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public posi- 
tions and occupations, according to their abilities and without 
distinction, except that of their virtues and talents. 

7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except 
in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any 
one soUciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed 
any arbitrary order shall be punished. But any citizen sum- 
moned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, 
as resistance constitutes an offense. 

8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are 
strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punish- 
ment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law, passed and 
promulgated before the commission of the offense. 

9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have 
been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all 
severity not essential to the securing of the prisoner's person shall 
be severely repressed by law. 



232 THE NEW HISTORY 

10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, 
including his religious views, provided their manifestation does 
not disturb the public order established by law. 

11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of 
the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, ac- 
cordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shaU be 
responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by 

law. . . 

12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen re- 
quires public miUtary force. These forces are, therefore, es- 
tabhshed for the good of all and not for the personal advantage 
of those to whom they shall be intrusted. 

13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance 
of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This 
should be equitably distributed among aU the citizens in propor- 
tion to their means. 

14. AU citizens have a right to decide, either personaUy or 
through their representatives, as to the necessity of the public 
contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is 
put ; and to fix the amount, the mode of assessment and of col- 
lection, and the duration of the taxes. 

15. Society has the right to require of every pubUc agent 
an account of his administration. 

16. A society in which the observance of the law is not 
assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitu- 
tion at all. 

17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no 
one shall be deprived thereof except in cases where pubHc neces- 
sity, legally determined, shall clearly require it, and then only 
on condition that the owner shall have been previously and 
equitably indemnified. 

Do not these ''principles of 1789" represent the 
most commonplace assumptions of European govern- 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 233 

ments to-day ? And yet every one of them was neg- 
lected by every European government in the eigh- 
teenth century, if we except England. M. Seignobos 
reminds us that ^'when a Frenchman turned his atten- 
tion to political questions in the eighteenth century, 
most of the institutions in the midst of which he lived 
appeared to him to be abuses contrary to reason and 
humanity." Now, if we are not prejudiced against 
the Declaration of the Rights of Man by careless and 
hostile critics and by the suggestions made during 
the debates by Sieyes and others, — which certainly 
reached a degree of fatuity rarely exceeded in the most 
futile of parliamentary discussions, — and if we neglect 
one or two oratorical flourishes, do we not find it to be, 
after all, simply a dignified and succinct repudiation 
of les abus ? Is it not a concrete and positive, although 
general, statement of the practical reforms which the 
Assembly was in duty bound to realize ? Was there 
not back of each article some crying evil of long stand- 
ing, in view of which the nation might expect a com- 
prehensive constitutional guaranty ? 

The Declaration is evidently the result of a compro- 
mise and reflects the confusion which reigns in the 
cahiers. Some wanted to enumerate the rights of man 
before he became a social being; others held that rights 
could only result from a contract; still others wished 
to formulate only such general principles as might be 
associated with the practical reform of existing insti- 
tutions. It seems that this last party of discretion 



234 



THE NEW HISTORY 



and sense was practically successful in the long run. 
They were not so conspicuous in the debates as the 
doctrinaire groups, but the obvious superiority of the 
final draft to all previously submitted is a tribute to 
the good sense of the Assembly, which knew how to 
repress the vagaries of the more fantastical deputies.^ 

It will be noted that in the text of the constitution of 
1791 the Declaration of the Rights of Man is followed, 
without a break, by the explicit abolition of a number 
of the most serious vices of the Ancien Regime ; and 
following this is a list of the natural and civil rights 
guaranteed by the constitution. 

To the greatest statesman of the Assembly, Mirabeau, 
the Declaration was in theory the ''exposition of cer- 
tain general principles, vahd for every pohtical society 
and every form of government." Nevertheless, in pre- 
paring a statement of these principles for the existing 
body poHtic — " vieux et presque caduc " — it was ab- 

1 Some of the most important articles only ratified concessions 
already made by the king or reforms introduced by the Assembly in 
the great decree abolishing the feudal system. The king had prom- 
ised on June 23 that the representatives of the nation should grant 
the taxes, that a yearly budget should be pubHshed, that privileges 
should exist no longer in the payment of taxes, and had asked the es- 
tates to confer with him upon the abolition of the lettres de cachet and 
the maintenance of the liberty of the press. Then, by the decree of 
August II, the Assembly had abolished the sale of judicial and munici- 
pal offices and declared all citizens eligible to office without distinc- 
tion of birth. These concessions of the king and this legislation of the 
Assembly made sufficiently real several important articles in the later 
declaration. 



"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 235 

solutely necessary to subordinate and adapt them to 
''many local circumstances." The object, Mirabeau 
declared, was 

to recall to the people, not what they had got from books or 
abstract meditations, but what they themselves had experienced, 
so that the Declaration of Rights, from which a political body 
should not deviate, should be such a statement as it would itself 
naturally make, were it accustomed to express its ideas — not 
an effort to teach a science. 

This is, gentlemen, a most essential distinction. Since Ub- 
erty has never been the fruit of theory resulting from philosoph- 
ical deductions, but springs from everyday experience and the 
simple reasoning which events excite, it follows that we shall be 
the better understood the nearer we approach to this reason- 
ing. . . . This is the way in which the Americans drew up 
their declaration of rights. They purposely left theory to one 
side and stated the political truths which were to be defined, in 
such a form that they might appeal to the people, to whom alone 
liberty is important, and who alone can maintain it.^ 

1 Hist. Pari., II, pp. 269, 270. 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM IN 
THE LIGHT OF HISTORY 



It is a long, long time since human history began, 
when a species of apes, probably closely allied to the 
gorilla and chimpanzee of the African forests, found 
itself able to go on its hind legs without the as- 
sistance of its fore limbs, leaving these free to be- 
come ever more dexterous arms and hands. This 
new being, with his good, big brain case, found that 
his ability to do things with his hands begat a 
tendency to use his advantages in novel ways. Acci- 
dentally easting bits of flint into the fire, he perceived 
that they would crack into convenient pieces for cut- 
ting and scraping, and so he perhaps made his first 
tools. What manner of creature he was — whether 
still hairy, and sleeping, mayhap, in trees like his con- 
geners, the apes of to-day — is a matter of conjecture. 
The veteran French archaeologist, de Mortillet, con- 
jectures that the earliest of the chipped stone tools 
foimd in the drift along river banks may be assigned 
to a period extending back two hundred and forty thou- 
sand years. Suppose we allow some two hundred and 
fifty thousand years back of that for the ancestors of 

236 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 237 

paleolithic man, the makers of the so-called "dawn 
stones'' (eoliths), we arrive at the conclusion that man 
and his upright forerunners have lived on the earth 
for at least half a million of years. ^ I think that few 
versed in prehistoric archaeology or in biology would 
feel incHned to reduce this period, although we have 
no way of determining it with any satisfactory degree 
of accuracy. Now to judge from the cavern remains, 
it would appear that no very great progress was 
made except in the skill with which the flints were 
chipped, in the variety of their forms, and in the 
decoration of bone objects, until perhaps ten thou- 
sand years ago, when the so-called neolithic or ground 
stone period, with its pottery, its agriculture, and 
its rude dwelUngs, comes clearly into sight. The 
American aborigines were still in the neolithic age 
when the first Europeans arrived in the late fifteenth 
century. 

These facts about man's past are still such compara- 
tively recent discoveries that they have not as yet so 
fundamentally revolutionized our thought as they 
should and will. Lyell's famous book on The An- 
tiquity of Man, which first brought the great age of the 
human species to the knowledge of intelligent EngHsh 
readers, was pubhshed in 1863. It is true that Augus- 

1 De Mortillet, G. et A., La Prehistoire, Paris s. d. (1910), pp. 
663 sq. Even archaeologists who are unconvinced that the so-called 
"eoliths" indicate human adaptations do not usually question the fact 
that man had probably used flint and shells long before the "fist 
hatchet " was elaborated. 



238 THE NEW HISTORY 

tine found it necessary, in order to secure precedence 
for the Hebrew prophets, to refute the "lying vanity" 
of certain authors who maintained that the Egyptians 
had been carrying on their astronomical observations 
for no less than a hundred thousand years. How was 
this possible, he scornfully asks, when not six thousand 
years have elapsed since the creation of the first man ? ^ 
This estimate of the great church father was somewhat 
reduced by an EngHsh prelate, Archbishop Usher, in 
the time of Cromwell. With laudable precision he 
assigned to Friday, October 28, 4004 B.C., the creation 
of all the terrestrial animals and the appearance of 
Adam, who, wholly inexperienced as he was, was called 
upon to devise a complete zoological nomenclature. 
Before the close of the day Eve was created to solace his 
loneliness, and the nuptials, duly performed, consti- 
tuted the last act of the first working week.^ Although 
some thoughtful philosophers and theologians of the 
early church had expressed doubts as to the literal 
truth of this account, Archbishop Usher's exactitude 
found favor in the eyes of Protestants in the seven- 
teenth century, and it was left for Darwin, Lyell, 
Huxley, and the anthropologists fundamentally to 
readjust our historical perspective, not half a cen- 
tury since. 

^De Civitate Dei, ed. Dombart (Teubner edition), lib. XVHI, 
cap. 40: "De Aegyptiorum mendacissima vanitate, quae antiquitati 
scientiae suae centum milia ascribit annorum." 

2 Annates veteris Testamenti a prima mundi origine deducti, London, 
1651, p. I. 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 239 

In order to understand the light which the discovery 
of the vast age of mankind casts on our present posi- 
tion, our relation to the past and our hopes for the 
future, let us borrow, with some modifications, an 
ingenious device for illustrating modern historical 
perspective.^ Let us imagine the whole history of 
mankind crowded into twelve hours, and that we are 
living at noon of the long human day. Let us, in the 
interest of moderation and convenient reckoning, 
assume that man has been upright and engaged in 
seeldng out inventions for only two hundred and forty 
thousand years. Each hour on our clock will then 
represent twenty thousand years, each minute three 
hundred and thirty-three and a third years. For over 
eleven and a half hours nothing was recorded. We 
know of no persons or events ; we only infer that man 
was living on the earth, for we find his stone tools, bits 
of his pottery, and some of his pictures of mammoths 
and bison. Not until twenty minutes before twelve 
do the earliest vestiges of Egyptian and Babylonian 
civilization begin to appear. The Greek literature, 
philosophy, and science of which we have been accus- 
tomed to speak as ''ancient," are not seven minutes 
old. At one minute before twelve Lord Bacon wrote 
his Advancement of Learning, to which we shall recur 
presently, and not half a minute has elapsed since 

1 One of Haeckel's students, Heinrich Schmidt, seems to have first 
hit upon this method of representing " cosmological perspective." 
See Lester F, Ward, Pure Sociology, 1907, p. 38, note. 



240 THE NEW HISTORY 

man first began to make the steam engine do his work 
for him. There is, I think, nothing delusive about 
this reduced scale of things. It is much easier for 
us to handle and speculate upon than the life-sized 
picture, which so transcends our experience that we 
cannot grasp it. 

/ Two reflections are obvious : In the first place, 
/ those whom we call the ancients — Thales, Pythago- 
I ras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hipparchus, Lucretius 
\— are really our contemporaries. However remote 
they may have seemed on Archbishop Usher's plan of 
the past, they now belong to our own age. We have 
no reason whatever to suppose that their minds were 
better or worse than ours, except in point of knowledge, 
which has been accumulating since their day. In the 
second place, we are struck by the fact that man's 
progress was at first shockingly slow, well-nigh im- 
perceptible for tens of thousands of years, but that it 
tends tQ increase in rapidity with an ever accelerating 
tempo.: Our forefathers, the drift men, may have 
satisfied themselves for a hundred thousand years with 
a single stone implement, the so-called coup de poing 
or fist hatchet, used, as Sir John Lubbock surmises, 
for as many purposes as a boy's jackknife. In time 
they learned to make scrapers, borers, arrow-heads, 
harpoon points, and rude needles of flint and bone. 
But it was scarcely more than half an hour before 
twelve by our clock that they can be shown to have 
invented pottery and become the possessors of herds. 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 241 

The use of bronze and iron is much more recent, and 
the men of the bronze age still retained a pious de- 
votion to the venerable stone hatchet, which the priests 
appear to have continued to use to slay their victims, 
long after the metals began to be used. 

The Greeks were the first of all peoples, so far as 
we know, to use their minds freely. They unques- 
tionably demonstrated the capacity of our intellects 
in ethics, metaphysics, logic, and mathematics, but the 
incalculable importance of the common things round 
about them escaped them in the main. Aristotle 
seems to have conceived that all the practical arts had 
already been discovered. He was willing that the slaves 
should be left to carry them on, while the philoso- 
phers reasoned on the ideals of a contemplative life, 
— on the good, the true, and the beautiful. Doubtless 
some advance was suggested in what we should call 
applied science, especially at Alexandria, but conditions 
were unpropitious, and mankind had no better ways of 
meeting his practical needs in Roman times than he 
had before Aristotle summed up all the achievements 
of the preceding Greek thinkers. The great Christian 
fathers, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, if they did not 
think material things absolutely bad, at least had no 
interest in them.^ Their gaze was fixed on the rela- 
tion of the soul to God. This transcended knowledge. 
Their contemporaries, the Neoplatonists, maintained 
that the highest truth came through intuition. Reason 

1 Henry Osborn Taylor, The MedicBval Mind, 191 1, Ch. IV. 

R 



242 THE NEW HISTORY 

could reveal at best only unimportant matters. Both 
Neoplatonists and Christians were far more interested 
in miracles and various magical and sacramental 
methods of promoting man's heavenly interests than 
in a study of God's world. It was with this heritage 
that the Middle Ages began. A great part of what 
had been known in the Fathers' time was forgotten. 
The textbooks handed down a little Greek knowledge, 
half understood and mixed with incredible errors. 
The natural world was looked upon as at best a sort 
of gigantic allegory. The minerals possessed moral and 
magical virtues, rather than chemical and physical. The 
alleged habits of the lion recalled the death and resur- 
rection of Christ, and those of the wren illustrated our 
dependence on the past. With the rediscovery of Aris- 
totle's works, which were prayerfully studied in the 
universities in the thirteenth century and elaborately 
explained and interpreted by the great Dominican 
friars, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, a new 
barrier was erected to the fruitful study of nature and 
the application of knowledge to man's material wel- 
fare. All of Aristotle's mistakes as well as all of the 
mistakes of his new interpreters, became sanctified. 

Roger Bacon, the first person, so far as we know, to 
express an unbounded confidence in the possibilities 
of experimental science, impatiently declared that it 
would be far better if all the works of Aristotle were 
destroyed than that the universities should be en- 
gaged in attempting to get at the sense of the bad Latin 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 243 

translations upon which they were dependent. Aris- 
totle, he concedes, certainly knew a great deal; but at 
best he only planted the tree of knowledge, and it 
had still many branches to put forth. ''If we mortals 
could continue to live for countless centuries, we could 
never hope to reach full and complete knowledge of all 
that is to be known." Bacon held that the intelHgent 
man of science should acquaint himself with the simple, 
homely things that farmers and old women know about. 
While in many ways the victim of his age, Roger 
Bacon, a Httle over six hundred years ago, gave first 
expression to the promise of man's happiness that lay 
in a study of plain material things. Experimental 
science,^ he prophesied, would enable men to move 
ships without rowers, carriages might be propelled 
at an incredible speed without animals to draw them, 
flying machines could be devised to navigate the air 
like birds, and bridges might be constructed without 
supports ingeniously to span rivers.^ 

These tentative and seemingly fantastic suggestions 
came — to revert to our clock —about two minutes be- 

1 Perhaps the most striking presentation of Bacon's view is to be 
found in the following words : "Quia licet per tria sciamus, videlicet 
per auctoritatem, et rationem, et experientiam, tamen auctoritas non 
sapit nisi detur ejus ratio, nee dat intellectum sed credulitatem ; 
credimus enim auctoritati, sed non propter earn intelligimus. Nee 
ratio potest scire an sophisma vel demonstratio, nisi eonclusionem 
sciamus experiri per opera." Compendium studii, Opera Inedita, 
ed. Brewer, p. 397. 

2 "Epistola Fratris Rogerii Baeonis de secretis operibus artis et 
naturae," loc. cit., pp. 532 sqq. 



244 THE NEW HISTORY 

fore twelve. A whole minute more was required before 
the expostulations of Roger Bacon were really heeded. 
The leaders of Protestantism had no heart in what we 
call progress. , Luther decried reason as a ^'pretty har- 
lot" who would blind us to the great truths God had 
revealed in the Bibles Melanchthon jreedited with 
enthusiastic approval an ancient astrology. .Calvin 
declared man innately and unspeakably bad and 
corrupt, utterly incapable of essentially bettering him- 
self. But Pomponazzi and Giordano Bruno, and then 
Francis Bacon and Descartes, about one minute before 
twelve, began to batter down the great edifice which 
the scholastic doctors had reared from the blocks they 
had appropriated from Aristotle. They pleaded for 
reason and denounced the senseless respect for tradi- 
tion. Descartes, at the close of his immortal treatise 
on The Method of Seeking Truths says that he is 
writing in his own native French instead of the Latin 
of his Jesuit instructors because he hopes to reach those 
who use their own good wits instead of relying on old 
books. A little earlier Lord Bacon published his 
wonderful Advancement of Learning, also in his own 
mother tongue, and at the end of his Hfe his Novum Or- 
ganon, in Latin. In both he deals with what he calls 
*'the kingdom of man." Augustine knew only of a 
kingdom of God and a kingdom of the devil. Lord 
Bacon was the first to popularize, in his varied and 
resourceful English, the promises of experimental 
science. He says : — 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 245 

Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should take 
a stand thereupon and discover what is the best way ; but when 
the discovery is well taken, then to make progression. And to 
speak truly, Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi. These times 
are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those 
which we account ancient or dine retrogrado, by a computation 
backward from ourselves. ... 

Another error that hath also some affinity with the former, 
is the conceit that of former opinions or sects, after variety and 
examination, the best hath still prevailed and suppressed the 
rest ; so that if a man should begin the labor of a new search, 
he were but like to light upon something formerly rejected, and 
by rejection brought into oblivion : as if the multitude, or the 
wisest for the multitude's sake, were not ready to give passage 
rather to that which is superficial, than to that which is substan- 
tial and profound ; for the truth is, that time seemeth to be of 
the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that 
which is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that 
which is weighty and solid. . . . 

Another error hath proceeded from too great a reverence 
and a kind of adoration of the mind and understanding of man ; 
by means whereof, men have withdrawn themselves too much 
from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of ex- 
perience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reason 
and conceits. Upon these intellectualists, which are notwith- 
standing commonly taken for the most sublime and divine 
philosophers, Heraclitus gave a just censure, saying, "Men 
sought truth in their own little worlds and not in the great and 
common world;" for they disdain to spell, and so by degrees 
to read in the volume of God's works. . . . 

But the greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or 
misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge. For men 
have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes 
upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes 



246 THE NEW HISTORY 

to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes 
for ornament and reputation ; and sometimes to enable them 
to victory of wit and contradiction, and most times for lucre 
and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of 
their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men ; as if there 
were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a search- 
ing and restless spirit ... or a shop for profit and sale ; and 
no°t a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of 
man's estate.^ 

Bacon thus undermines reverence for the past by 
pointing out that it rests on a gross misapprehension. 
Living before us, the ancients could not be expected 
to be our peers in knowledge or experience. He would 
have the universities give up worshiping Aristotle and 
his commentators, cease ''tumbling up and down" in 
their own metaphysical exaltations, and turn to the 
study of real things in the world about them. The 
reason for such study should be, first and foremost, 
the bright prospect of relieving man's estate. Like Sir 
Thomas More, Bacon wrote a Utopia, the New 
.Atlmtis. The central feature of his ideal commu- 
nity was a national academy of sciences, a sort of 
Carnegie Institution, in which all sorts of experiments 
were carried on with a view to making discoveries 
designed to better the people's lot. Bacon has often 
been reproached with making no real contributions to 
science.2 The criticism is probably just, but his role 

1 Advancement of Learning, Bk. I, Ch. V, sections i-ii, passim. 

2 For example by Draper, in his History of the Intellectual Develop- 
ment of Europe. 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 247 

was that of a herald, as he himself recognized. He was 
the trumpeter who announced the dawn of our own 
day. 

It was in 1605 that the Advancement of Learning 
was first pubHshed. (And we may safely say that it is 
scarcely three centuries since the idea of the possibiHty 
of indefinite progress through man's own conscious 
efforts first clearly emerged in the minds of a very few 
thoughtful persons. And it is to Francis Bacon that 
the glory is due, as we have said, of first populariz- 
ing this great idea — the greatest single idea in the 
whole history of mankind in the vista of possibilities 
which it opens before us.^ 

The idea of conscious progress was not only essen- 
tially new; it could only develop in an obviously 
dynamic social environment and with the growth of 
historic perspective. The Greek thinkers did not have 
it at all in its modern form, so far as we can judge. It 
is true that Herodotus had a lively appreciation of the 
general debt of Greek civilization to the Egyptians, 
and Plato now and then refers to Egypt, but there is 
no clear comprehension of just what we call progress. 
Aristotle was keenly aware of the development of 
Greek philosophy since the Ionian philosophers, but 
there is nothing to indicate that he thought of mankind 
as going on indefinitely discovering new truth, and 
he had none of Lord Bacon's interest in seeing the 
results of natural science applied to the gradual ame- 
lioration of the general lot of mankind. Lucretius, 



248 THE NEW HISTORY 

the Epicurean philosopher of Cicero's time, doubtless 
reflecting earlier Greek speculations, guessed that there 
had been a stone age, a bronze age, and an iron age.^ 
But his was no philosophy of progress. Men might, 
it is true, understand the universe so far as to perceive 
that it was the result of a fortuitous concourse of 
atoms, Hmited in kinds and obeying certain fixed laws. 
But the chief significance of this to Lucretius lay in 
abolishing all fear of the gods and of death. He did 
not discover in his mechanistic universe any promise 
of steady human progress. Indeed, he thought that 
a degeneration was setting in which foreboded the 
complete dissolution of the universe as we know it. 
In short, the Greek and Roman philosophers would 
have agreed with the medieval theologians in accepting 
the stationary character of the civilization with which 
they were familiar. 

Augustine and his disciple, Orosius, gave history 
a new background, and illustrated God's dealings 
with man, from the Garden of Eden to the sack of 
Rome by Alaric ; but they knew Httle or nothing of 
man's long history and unconscious progress in the 
past, nor did they anticipate any future improvement, 
for to the ardent Christian no earthly betterment 

1 In the oft-quoted and remarkable lines : — 

Arma antiqua manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt 
Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami, 
Posterius f erri vis est aerisque reperta ; 
Sed prior aeris erat quam ferri cognitus usus. 

— De rerum natura, Bk. V, vv. 1281 sqq. 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 



249 



could compare with the overwhelming issue which 
awaited man after death,, when every one entered 
into eternal and unchanging bHss or misery. Accord- 
ingly, emulation consisted at best, until the opening 
of the seventeenth century, in striving to reach stand- 
ards set by the past. The mere age of an institution 
or a behef came to be its surest sanction. The present 
might consider itself fortunate if it was at any point 
as good as the past. Only with Giordano Bruno and 
Lord Bacon did the strength of authority and tradi-/ 
tion begin to be weakened, in spite of the hostiHty^ 
and consistent opposition of those who believed that 
they were defending God-given arrangements againstl 
the attacks of infidels, freethinkers, and rationalists.^'J 
The process of weakening authority has been very 
rapid, considering its novelty and its fundamental char- 
acter. ^ It went on apace in the eighteenth century. 
Beccaria, the Itahan jurist, who pleaded so eloquently 
for the revision of the horrible criminal law, foresaw 
that the conservatives would urge that the practices 
which he sought to abolish were ratified by a hoary 
past; he begged them to recollect that the past was 
after all only an immense sea of errors from which 
there emerged here and there an obscure truth.2 Dur- 

1 This cursory treatment of a great theme, the origin of the idea of 
progress, may be supplemented by Delvaille, J., Essai sur I'Mstoire de 
Itdee de Progres jusgu'd la fin d^c XVIIIieme Steele, igio; Laurent. 
£udessnr I histoire de rhumanite, 1866, Ch. XII, pp. 63 sqq • and 
Fhnt, Htstory of the Philosophy of History, pp. 88 sqq. 

^ Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, 1788, p. 113. 



2 JO THE NEW HISTORY 

ing the early years of the French Revolution, and un- 
der most discouraging circumstances, Condorcet wrote 
his famous treatise on the indefinite perfectibihty 
of man. In it he seeks to trace the steps which human- 
ity has taken in the past toward truth and happi- 
ness "Ces observations," he trusts, "sur ce que 
I'homme a ete, sur ce qu'il est aujourd'hui, conduiront 
ensuite aux moyens d'assurer et d'accelerer les nou- 
veaux progres que sa nature lui permet d'esperer 
encore. Tel est le but de I'ouvrage que j'ai enterpns, 
et dont le r6sultat sera de montrer, par le raisonne- 
ment et par les faits, qu'il n'a ete marqu6 aucun ternie 
au perfectionnement des facultes humames, que la 
perfectibilit6 de I'homme est rSellement indefinie; que 
les progres de cette perfectibility, d6sormais independ- 
ent de toute puissance qui voudrait FarrSter, n'ont 
d'autre terme que la dur6e du globe oil la nature nous 

ajetes."^ , 

These genial speculations tending to turn men s eyes 
toward the future rather than the past were tremen- 
dously reenforced by the scientific discoveries of the 
nineteenth century. These proved, first, that man 
was learning a great deal more than any one had ever 
known before about the world and his place in it. 
Secondly, he was applying his knowledge in such a 
way as to make older methods of manufacture and 
transportation and communication appear very crude 

I " Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de I'esprit humain," 
1797. P- 4- 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 251 

and antiquated. Lastly, Darwin, Lyell, Boucher de 
Perthes, Huxley, G. de Mortillet, Haeckel, and the 
rest established the fact that long before historic 
times man had proved himself capable of the most 
startling progress. He had not only made his way 
from savagery to civilization, but from the estate of 
an animal to that of a man. Not only had his an- 
cestors gone on all fours and lived as the beasts of 
the field, but their remoter ancestors had mayhap 
Kved in the sea and, as Darwin conjectures, resembled 
a so-called Ascidian larva, a tadpole-Hke creature not 
yet supplied with an unmistakable backbone. • Roger 
Bacon, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Beccaria, Condorcet, 
— these and many like them stoutly maintained that 
man could learn indefinitely more than any of his 
predecessors had known, and could better his estate in- 
definitely by the use of this knowledge and the deser- 
tion of ancient prejudices and habits. The nineteenth 
century proved conclusively that he had been learning 
and had been bettering himself for hundreds of thou- 
sands of years. ," But all this earlier progress had been 
unconscious/ For the first time, close upon our own 
day, progress became an ideal consciously proclaimed 
and sought. So, whatever the progress of man has been 
during the twelve hours which we assign to him since 
he became man, it was only at about one minute to 
twelve that he came to wish to progress, and still more 
recently that he came to see that he can voluntarily pro- 
gress, and that he has progressed. This appears to 



Q-2 THE NEW HISTORY 

me to be the most impressive message that history 
has to give us, and the most vital in the light that it 
casts on the conduct of life. 



II 

If it be conceded that what we rather vaguely and 
provisionally call social betterment is coming to be 
regarded by large numbers of thoughtful persons as 
the chief interest in this game of life, does not the 
supreme value of history lie for us to-day in the sug- 
gestions that it may give us of what may be called 
the technique of progress, and ought not those phases 
of the past especially to engross our attention which 
bear on this essential point ? History has been regu- 
larly invoked, to substantiate the claims of the 
conservative, but has hitherto usually been neglected 
by the radical,^ or impatiently repudiated as the 
chosen weapon of his enemy. The radical has not yet 
Perceived the overwhelming value to him of a real 
[understanding of the past. It is his weapon by right, 
\ and he should wrest it from the hand of the conserva- 
tive. It has received a far keener edge during the 
last century, and it is the chief end of this essay to 
indicate how it can be used with the most decisive 
effect on the conservative. 

So far as I know, no satisfactory analysis has ever 

1 The Marxian socialist, of course, uses his version of the past in 
support of his plan of social amelioration. 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 253 

been made of the conservative and radical tempera- 
ments. It is commonly assumed that every boy and 
girl is born into one or the other party, and doubtless 
as mere animals we differ greatly in our bravery, 
energy, and hopefulness. But nurture is now seen 
to be all that separates even the most uncompromis- 
ing radical from a life far lower than that of any 
savage that exists on the earth at the present time. 
Even the recently extinct race of Tasmanians, still 
in a paleolithic stage of development, represented 
achievements which it took man long ages to ac- 
cumulate. The literally uneducated European even 
to-day could neither frame a sentence nor sharpen a 
stick with a shell. //A great part, then, of all that goes 
to make up the conservative or radical may be deemed 
the result of education in the broadest sense of that 
term, including everything that he has got from asso- 
ciating since infancy with civilized companions/ I 
think that the modern anthropologist and psychologist 
would agree on this point; at least, every one who 
allows his mind to play freely over the question must 
concede that a great part of what has been mistaken 
for nature is really nurture, direct and indirect, con- 
scious or, more commonly, wholly unconscious. 

Now it has been the constant objection urged by 
the conservative against any reform of which he dis- 
approved that it involved a change of human nature. 
He has flattered himself that he knew the chief char- 
acteristics of humanity and that, since it was hope- 



254 THE NEW HISTORY 

less to alter any of these, a change which seemed to 
imply such an alteration was obviously impracticable. 
This argument was long ago met by Montaigne, who 
declared that one who viewed Mother Nature in her 
full majesty and luster might perceive so general and 
so constant a variety that any individual and even the 
whole kingdom in which he happened to Hve must 
seem but a pin's point in comparison.^ But there is 
a wholly new argument now available. Whether the 
zoologists are quite right or no in denying the possi- 
bility of the hereditary transmission of acquired 
traits, there is no reason to think that one particle of 
culture ever gets into the blood of our human species ; 
it must either be transmitted by imitation or inculca- 
tion, or be lost, as Gabriel Tarde has made clear. We 
doubtless inherit the aptitudes of our parents, grand- 
parents, and remoter ancestors ; but any actual exer- 
cise that they may have made of the faculties which we 
share with them cannot influence us except by example 
or emulation. Those things that the radical would 
alter and the conservative defend are therefore not traits 
of human nature hut artificial achievements of human 
nurture. Accordingly, the anthropologist and his- 
torian can rule out this fundamental conservative 
appeal to human nature by showing that the most 
extraordinary variety has existed and still exists in 
the habits, institutions, and feelings of various groups 
of mankind ; and the student familiar with the chief 
1 "On Education," Essays, Bk. I, Ch. XXV. 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 255 

results of embryology will see that the conservative 
has constantly mistaken the artificially acquired and 
hereditarily non-transmissible for constant and unal- 
terable elements in our native outfit. And, indeed, it 
may be asked, if it has proved possible to alter an in- 
vertebrate tadpole-like creature living in the sea into 
an ape-Hke animal sleeping in a tree, and to transform 
the ape-like animal into an ingenious flint-chipping 
artist, able to paint pictures of bison and deer on the 
walls of a cave, and to derive from the flint chipper 
of the stone age a Plato able to tell a most edifying 
tale about a cave full of conservatives, what becomes 
of the argument for the fixity of human nature in any 
important sense ? 

Wliile it is then highly unscientific and unhistorical 
to consider the way in which men behave and feel 
at any particular time as exhibiting the normal and 
immutable principles of human nature, history and 
anthropology nevertheless concur in proving that 
each new generation is indebted to the previous gen- 
eration for very nearly all that it is and has. This 
is true of even the most rapidly progressing societies, 
and there is reason to suppose that a group of mankind 
could live indefinitely adhering to an unchanged 
scheme of civilization so long as they were undis- 
turbed and their environment remained constant. 
We have seen how very recently the idea that progress 
is possible has dawned upon a small portion of man- 
kind. The alterations which any people can effect 



256 THE NEW HISTORY 

within a half century in its prevaiHng ideas and insti- 
tutions, and in the range and character of its gen- 
erally diffused knowledge, are necessarily slight when 
compared with the vast heritage which has gradually 
been accumulating during hundreds of thousands 
of years. In order to make the nature and variety 
of our abject dependence on the past clear, we have 
only to consider our language, our laws, our political 
and social institutions, our knowledge and education, 
our view of this world and the next, our tastes and the 
means of gratifying them. On every hand the past 
dominates and controls us, for the most part uncon- 
sciously and without protest on our part. We are 
in the main its willing adherents. The imagination 
of the most radically-minded cannot transcend any 
great part of the ideas and customs transmitted to 
him. When once we grasp this truth, we shall, accord- 
ing to our mood, humbly congratulate ourselves that, 
poor pygmies that we are, we are permitted to stand 
on the giant's shoulders and enjoy an outlook that 
would be quite hidden from us if we had to trust to 
our own short legs ; or we may resentfully chafe at our 
bonds and, Hke Prometheus, vainly strive to wrest 
ourselves from the rock of the past, in our eagerness 
to bring relief to the suffering children of men. 

Es erben sich Gesetz' und Rechte 
Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort. 

In any case, whether we bless or curse the past, we 
are inevitably its offspring, and it makes us its own 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 257 

long before we realize it. It is, indeed, almost all that 
we can have. The most frantic of us must follow 
the beaten path; we are like a squirrel in his revolv- 
ing cage. 

There is no space here to discuss the general rela- 
tion of history to the causes and technique of progress, 
but a word may be said of the effect which our modern 
outlook should have on our estimate of the conserva- 
tive mood. Mr. John Morley has given an unpleas- 
ant but not inaccurate sketch of the conservative, 
''with his inexhaustible patience of abuses that only 
torment others; his apologetic word for behefs that 
may not be so precisely true as one might wish, and 
institutions that are not altogether so useful as some 
might think possible ; his cordiality towards progress 
and improvement in a general way, and his coldness 
or antipathy to each progressive proposal in particular ; 
his pygmy hope that life will one day become somewhat 
better, punily shivering by the side of his gigantic 
conviction that it might well be infinitely worse." 
How numerous and how respectable is still this class ! 
It is made up of clergymen, lawyers, teachers, editors, 
and successful men of affairs. Doubtless some of 
them are nervous and apologetic, and try to find 
reasons to disguise their general opposition to change 
by taking credit for improvements to which they con- 
tribute nothing, or by forwarding some minor changes 
which exhaust their powers of imagination and 
innovation. But how rarely does one of them fail, 



258 THE NEW HISTORY 

when he addresses the young, to utter some warning, 
some praise of the past, some discouragement to 
effort and the onward struggle ! The conservative 
is a perfectly explicable and inevitable product of 
that long, long period before man woke up to the 
possibility of conscious betterment. He still justifies 
existing conditions and ideas by the standards of the 
past rather than by those of the present or future. 
He neither vividly realizes how mightily things have 
advanced in times gone by, nor has he the imagination 
to see how easily they could be indefinitely bettered, 
if the temperament which he represents could cease 
to be artificially fostered. 

Should the conservative be roused to defend him- 
self, having been driven from the protection which his 
discredited conception of ''human nature" formerly 
offered, he may ask peevishly, ''what does progress 
mean anyway ? " But no one who realizes the relative 
barbarism of our whole civilization, which contains, 
on a fair appraisal, so little to cheer us except promises 
for the future, will have the patience to formulate 
any general definition of progress when the most 
bewildering opportunities for betterment summon 
us on every side. What can the conservative point 
to that is not susceptible of improvement ? 

There is one more solace, perhaps the last, for the 
hard-pressed conservative. He may heartily agree 
that much improvement has taken place and claim 
that he views with deep satisfaction all deliberate 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 259 

and decorous progress, but ascribe to himself the 
modest and perhaps ungrateful function of acting as 
a brake which prevents the chariot of progress from 
rushing headlong down a decline. But is there any 
reason to suppose that any brake is necessary ? Have 
fiery radicals ever got possession of the reins and 
actually driven for a time at a breakneck speed? 
The conservative would find it extremely difficult 
to cite historic examples, but doubtless the Reign of 
Terror would occur to him as an instance. This 
certainly has more plausibility than any other alleged 
example in the whole recorded history of mankind. 
But Camille Desmoulins, one of its most amiable 
victims, threw the blame of the whole affair, with 
much sound reasoning, on the precious conservatives 
themselves. And I think that all scholars would agree 
that the incapable and traitorous Louis XVI and his 
runaway nobles, supported by the threats of the mon- 
archs of Prussia and Austria, were at the bottom of 
the whole matter. In any case, as Desmoulins urges, 
the blood shed in the cause of liberty was as nothing 
to that which had been spilt by kings and prelates 
in maintaining their dominion and satisfying their 
ambitions.^ 

So even this favorite instance of o'er-rapid change 
will scarcely bear impartial scrutiny, and we may 
safely assert that so far the chariot of progress has 
always been toiling up a steep incline and that the 

^ "Vieux Cordelier," No. 3, December, 1793. 



26o THE NEW HISTORY 

restraining brake of the conservatives has been worse 
than useless. MaeterHnck exhorts us never to fear 
that we shall be drawn too far or too rapidly; and 
there is certainly nothing in the past or present to 
justify this fear. On the contrary, as he says, ^' There 
are men enough about us whose exclusive duty, whose 
precise mission, is to extinguish the fires that we 
kindle." *'At every crossway on the road that leads 
to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a 
thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us 
have no fear lest the fairest towers of former days be 
sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid 
among us can do is not to add to the immense dead- 
weight which nature drags along." 

History, the whole history of man and of the organic 
universe, seems now to put the conservative arguments 
to shame. Indeed it seems to do more ; it seems to 
justify the mystic confidence in the future suggested 
in Maeterlinck's Our Social Duty. Perhaps, as he 
believes, an excess of radicalism is essential to the 
equilibrium of life. ''Let us not say to ourselves," 
he urges, ''that the best truth always lies in modera- 
tion, in the decent average. This would perhaps be so 
if the majority of men did not think on a much lower 
plane than is needful. That is why it behooves others 
to think and hope on a higher plane than seems reason- 
able. The average, the decent moderation of to-day, 
will be the least human of things to-morrow. At the 
time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 261 

sense and of the just medium was certainly that people 
ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; 
extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded 
that they should burn none at all." 

Here again we may turn to the past for its authenti- 
cating testimony. A society without slaves would 
have been almost incomprehensible to Plato and Aris- 
totle. To the latter slavery was an inevitable corollary 
of human society. To Innocent III a church without 
graft was a hopeless ideal. To Richelieu a foreign 
service without bribery was a myth. To Beccaria a 
criminal procedure without torture, and courts without 
corrupt judges, were a dream. It would have seemed 
preposterous enough to Franklin to forecast a time 
when a Philadelphian could converse in his home with 
friends far beyond the Mississippi, or to assert that 
one day letters would be carried to all parts of the earth 
for so small a sum that even the poorest would not 
find the expense an obstacle to communication. But 
all these hopeless, preposterous dreams have come to 
pass and that in a little more than a hundred years. 

From forwarding these achievements the conserva- 
tive has hitherto held himself aloof, whether from tem- 
perament, ignorance, or despair. But let us exonerate 
him, for he knew no better. He had not the wit to 
see that he was a vestige of a long, unenlightened 
epoch. But history would seem to show that this 
period of exemption from service is now at an end. It 
is plain that his theory that human nature cannot be 



262 THE NEW HISTORY 

altered is exploded, as well as his belief that a fractious 
world needs him to apply the brakes. 

The conservative has, in short, been victimized 
by a misunderstood past. Hitherto the radical has 
appealed to the future, but now he can confidently rest 
his case on past achievement and current success. 
He can point to what has been done, he can cite what 
is being done, he can perceive as never before what 
remains to be done, and, lastly, he begins to see, as 
never before, how it will get done. It has been the 
chief business of this essay to suggest what has been 
done. If there were time, I might try to show that 
progress in knowledge and its application to the allevia- 
tion of man's estate is more rapid now than ever be- 
fore. But this scarcely needs formal proof; it is so 
obvious. A few years ago an eminent French lit- 
terateur, Brunetiere, declared science bankrupt. This 
was on the eve of the discoveries in radioactivity 
which have opened up great vistas of possible human 
readjustments if we could but learn to control and 
utilize the inexhaustible sources of power that lie 
within the atom. It was on the eve of the discovery 
of the functions of the white blood corpuscles, which 
clears the way for indefinite advance in medicine. 
Only a poor discouraged man of letters could think 
for a moment that science was bankrupt. No one 
entitled to an opinion on the subject believes that 
we have made more than a beginning in penetrating 
the secrets of the organic and inorganic world. 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 263 

In the fourth canto of the Inferno Dante describes 
the confines of hell. Here he heard sighs which made 
the eternal air to tremble. These came of the woe felt 
by multitudes, which were many and great, of infants 
and of women and men who, although they had lived 
guiltless lives, were condemned for being born before 
the true reHgion had been revealed. They lived with- 
out hope. But in the midst of the gloom he beheld a 
fire that conquered a hemisphere of darkness. Here, in 
a place open, luminous, and high, people with eyes 
slow and grave, of great authority in their looks, sat 
on the greensward, speaking seldom and with soft 
voices. These were the ancient philosophers, states- 
men, military heroes, and men of letters. Neither 
sad nor glad, they held high discourse, heedless of the 
wails of infants, unconscious of the horrors of hell 
which boiled beneath them. They knew nothing of 
the mountain of purgatorial progress on the other side 
of the earth, which others were climbing, and heaven 
was forever inaccessible to them. Yet why should 
they regret it — were they not already in the only 
heaven they were fit for ? 

As for accomphshing the great reforms that demand 
our united efforts — the abolition of poverty and dis- 
ease and war, and the promotion of happy and ra- 
tional lives — the task would seem hopeless enough 
were it not for the considerations which have been 
recalled above. Until very recently the leaders of 
men have looked backward for their standards and 



264 



THE NEW HISTORY 



ideals. The intellectual ancestors of the conservative 
extend back in an unbroken line to the very begin- 
ning of human history. The reformer who appeals 
to the future is a recent upstart. He belongs to the 
last half minute of our historical reckoning. His 
family is a new one, and its members have often seemed 
very black sheep to the good old family of conserva- 
tives who have found no names too terrible to apply 
to the Anthony Collinses, the Voltaires and Tom 
Paines, who now seem so innocent and commonplace 
in most of their teachings. But it is clear enough to- 
day that the conscious reformer who appeals to the 
future is the final product of a progressive order of 
things. While the conservative sullenly opposed what 
were in Roger Bacon's time called "suspicious novel- 
ties," and condemned changes either as wicked or 
impracticable, he was himself being gradually drawn 
along in a process of insensible betterment in which 
he refused consciously to participate. Even those of 
us who have httle taste for mysticism have to recognize 
a mysterious unconscious impulse which appears to 
be a concomitant of natural order. It would seem^ as 
if this impulse has always been unsettling the exist- 
ing conditions and pushing forward, groping after 
something more elaborate and intricate than what 
already existed. This vital impulse, elan vital, as 
Bergson calls it, represents the inherent radicahsm of 
nature herself. This power that makes for experi- 
mental readjustment, — for adventure in the broadest 



THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 265 

sense of the term, — is no longer a conception con- 
fined to poets and dreamers, but must be reckoned 
with by the most exacting historian and the hardest- 
headed man of science. We are only just coming to 
realize that we can cooperate with and direct this in- 
nate force of change which has so long been silently 
operating, in spite of the respectable lethargy, indif- 
ference, and even protests of man himself, the most 
educable of all its creatures. 

At last, perhaps, the long-disputed sin against the 
Holy Ghost has been found ; it may be the refusal 
to cooperate with the vital principle of betterment. 
History would seem, in short, to condemn the prin- 
ciple of conservatism as a hopeless and wicked anach- 
ronism. 

If what has been said above is true, or any consid- 
erable part of it, is not almost our whole education at 
fault? We make no consistent effort to cultivate a 
progressive spirit in our boys and girls. They are not 
made to reahze the responsibility that rests upon them 
— the exhilaration that comes from ever looking and 
pressing forward. They are still so largely nurtured 
upon the abstract and the classical that we scarcely 
yet dare to bring education into relation with life. 
The history they are taught brings few or none of the 
lessons the past has to offer. They are reared with 
too much respect for the past, too little confidence 
for the future. Does not education become in this 
way a mighty barrier cast across the way of progress, 



^gg THE NEW HISTORY 

rather than a guidepost to betterment? Would not 
most o those ^charge of the education of our youth 
"emble before the possibility of haying them reahze 
Sly what has been hinted in thxs essay? What 
Sd happen if the teachers in our schoo^ and co^ 
leges our theological semmanes and ^w schools, 
slou d make it their business to emphasize the tem- 
tray'nd provisional character of the mstruction 
?h Ly ofier, and urge the students to transc^d 
it as fast as a progressive world permitted? The 
humo ofs nature' of such a suggestion shows how 
iTwe are stiU from any general realization and 
acceptance of the great lesson of history. _ 

"Let us " to quote Maeterhnck once more, think 
of the gr at invisible ship that carries our human 
destties'upon eternity. Like the vessel of our con- 
ted oceans, she has her sails and her bal ast. Th 
fear that she may pitch or roll on leavmg the oad 
stead is no reason for increasing the weight of he 
b Hast by stowing the fair white sails in the dep... 
f the hold. They were not woven to -^^'^if^^ 
. ide with cobblestones in the dark. Bal ast exists 

will collect the winds of space. 



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